MAN'S 

UNCONSCIOUS 

CONFLICT 




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MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 



MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS 
CONFLICT 

A Popular Exposition of Psychoanalysis 

BY 

WILFRID LAY, Ph.D. 



For there is nothing hid which shall not be manifested. 

— Mark iv:22 




^ 



NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1922 



.Lb 



Copyright, 1917 
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC. 



/vi 




PRINTED IN U. S. A. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. INTRODUCTION i 

II. THE UNKNOWN ELEMENT IN ACTION 14 

III. THE CEDIPUS MYTH 18 

IV. THE FORE-CONSCIOUS 38 

V. THE UNCONSCIOUS. (DESCRIPTIVE) . 43 

A. Complete Retentiveness 45 

B. Repression 50 

C. Independent Vitality 65 

D. Symbolism 67 

E. The Censor ....... 71 

F. Sublimation 80 

G. Introversion 82 

H. Pleasure-Pain versus Reality ... 85 

I. Regression 88 

J. Universality of Manifestation ... 90 \ 

VI. THE UNCONSCIOUS (DYNAMIC) . . 93 

A. Craving or Reality? 93 

B. Where Do Thoughts Come From? . . 98 

C. Resistances 107 

D. Conflicts no 

E. Complexes 112 

F. Phobias 118 

G. Our Mental Attitude 121 






v 



,1 



vi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

VII. THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE .... 127 

VIII. DREAMS . 144 

IX. TWO KINDS OF THINKING .... 176 

X. EVERYDAY LIFE 200 

XI. PSYCHOTHERAPY 220 

A. The Moral Struggle 220 

B. Reasoning by Analogy 233 

C. Psychic Gravitation 244 

D. The Transference 260 

XII. EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS ... 265 

A. The Object of Mental Activity . . 266 

B. The Father-Image 273 

C. The Superiority Feeling 280 

D. "He Irritates Me" 284 

E. Memory Work 293 

F. Abstract Thinking 301 

G. Hate, Anger and Love 304 

XIII. CONCLUSION 314 

INDEX . , » • . 317 



i 






MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 



. 



MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS 
CONFLICT 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 

In the Greek mythology the Titans are the chil- 
dren of Earth and Heaven and, because they 
warred with the gods, were cast into the gulf of 
Tartarus, where they lie prostrate, but occa- 
sionally, becoming restive, shake their bonds and 
in so doing cause the earth to tremble. In each 
one of us there lives a Titan. As the Titans 
represented the crude forces of nature that were 
later brought into subjection by the gods who 
introduced a reign of order, so the Titan that is 
in each one of us represents the primal impulses 
of animal life which have through the ages been 
brought into some semblance of order by the 
force of society. But just as the Titans in the 
old mythology made themselves felt in disturb- 
ances of the equilibrium of the world, so some- 
times do the Titans * residing in us all break 

* Freud, in his Interpretation of Dreams, p. 435, says: "These 
ever-moving and so to speak immortal wishes of our Unconscious, 



2 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

loose and do much damage in our daily life. 
And as the Titans were chained in the deep pit, 
and could never show their faces to the light of 
day, so these primordial vital forces are generally 
controlled by the restraints of organised society, 
and are as little in evidence to most people as if 
they too were chained at the bottom of a pit. 
Their writhings, however, are not without effect 
on our daily thoughts and on our bodily func- 
tions, as will be seen in the chapters that follow. 
That part of our mental life of which as a gen- 
eral rule we know nothing, but which exerts % 
great influence upon our actions, is known to the 
newer psychology as the Unconscious, and in this 
book I frequently refer to it as the unknown 
Titan. It is well to be informed of this archaic 
being which constitutes so great a part of our 
ego, for if rightly understood it will enable us to 
develop all the power that we have, up to the 
limit of our possibility, while, on the other hand, 
an ignorance of its very existence and of its 
effect on human conduct has been the cause of 
much misunderstanding and sorrow. It is the 
hope of the present writer that some, at least, of 
the unhappiness of this life we lead may be seen 

which reminds us of the Titans of the myth, on whom since the 
earliest times has pressed heavily the weight of the mountains 
which were hurled upon them by the victorious gods and which 
even now tremble at the occasional quivering of their limbs." 



INTRODUCTION 3 

to be as unnecessary as it really is, when a deeper 
insight is gained into the real causes of much that 
we now misunderstand. 

The title-page of Bulfinch's Age of Fable is 
embellished with the following stanza of Barry 
Cornwall : 

ye delicious fables! where the wave 

And woods were peopled, and the air, with 
things 

So lovely! why, ah! why has science grave 
Scattered afar your sweet imaginings? 

It is a feature of the new science of psycho- 
analysis, touched upon in the following pages 
from time to time, that it has given a fresh interest 
and value to these sweet imaginings of mythology, 
and instead of banishing them afar, has brought 
them to our very doors — nay, into our very 
hearts — in a new and original way. Science, 
while perhaps not yet entitled to be called gay, 
is not, in the results of psychoanalytic research, 
any longer to be truly called grave, for it has 
through its workers, Freud and others, opened up 
a prospect which is full of promise for the re- 
moval of much that has been grotesque, not to 
say gruesome, in our social life. 

The foundations of a new psychology of cer- 
tain aspects of a limited number of mental aber- 



4 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

rations were laid down in Vienna about 1890 by 
a physician specialising in nervous diseases, Dr. 
Sigmund Freud. He disclaims having made a 
complete system, either of philosophy or of psy- 
chology, but the principles which he stated have 
found so wide an application that the Freudian 
psychology, the details of which have been and 
are being worked out by numerous psychologists 
and physicians both in Europe and in this coun- 
try, seems likely not only to become a complete 
philosophy of life, but, in its practical results, to 
be more valuable than all previous philosophies, 
idealised as they have been out of one man's 
thoughts or elaborated from the conversations of 
many men. For its application is primarily per- 
sonal and individual, however general its laws 
may be, and its aim in the hands of its founder 
has been the consistent one of alleviating human 
suffering, both mental and physical; and we all 
know how very real mental suffering may some- 
times be. 

It seems unique, and yet, in view of the prag- 
matic trend of philosophy during the last decades, 
quite in accordance with the spirit of modern 
civilisation, that a philosophy, including a psy- 
chology, — sciences which, in the past, have been 
associated with anything but practical ends, — 
should be devoted principally to the alleviation 
of human physical ills. The age that has seen 



INTRODUCTION 5 

the telephone, and wireless telegraphy, and aero- 
nautics developed to a practical point of useful- 
ness has now turned its attention toward making 
what always before seemed in the clouds appear 
to be amenable to human control and for human 
practical purposes or curing physical ills. Thus 
has Freud become the first aeronaut in the empy- 
rean of the human mind, and has reconnoitred 
and brought back to us exact information con- 
cerning matters of which otherwise we should 
have known nothing. 

It seems marvellous that we can at last fly in 
the air, and that we have used our airships for 
destruction in warfare. It also seems quite as 
marvellous that we have learned how to enlist 
the curative power of nature by an appeal to the 
emotions through the intellect. For an increas- 
ingly large number of human ills we now go to 
specialists and physicians who never write a pre- 
scription for any drug for us, never give us a 
diet list or prescribe exercise or rest. We tell 
them our bodily ills and they talk to us. There 
is no manipulation, there are no hypnotic passes, 
but there is the most patient and detailed study 
of our mental attitudes toward our ills, there is 
the most painstaking inquiry into everything we 
have ever thought about them. This mental 
specialist takes a sort of spiritual inventory of 
our beliefs, suppositions, misbeliefs, supersti- 



6 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

tions and queer ideas about our own mental and 
bodily physiology. We all have strange miscon- 
ceptions about nutrition, growth, reproduction! 
This new variety of specialist listens for days at 
a time and finally tells us some few truths which 
act dynamically on our mental powers, and we 
begin to see things about life which we never 
dreamed of before or did not know we dreamed 
of. We begin to put in order the disordered 
thoughts which we have been thinking for years, 
from our earliest infancy indeed, and to associate 
these thoughts as they should be associated in 
order to make us as much use to society as we 
could possibly be. Then the health we may have 
lost, whatever disorders of a physical nature we 
may have had, caused by the disorderliness of our 
mental operations, commences to come back to 
us. 

In comparing Freud to a psychical aviator, I 
might liken the medium in which he has navigated 
so surprisingly to the world of dreams. Perhaps 
nothing, to the so-called practical person, looks 
so impractical as this very world of dreams, but 
nothing would a few years ago have been thought 
more ridiculously impossible than that we should 
be able to fly twenty miles in less than thirty 
minutes to take lunch with a friend in a neigh- 
bouring city. Remarkable advances have been 
made recently in the use in large manufactures of 



INTRODUCTION 7 

quantities of by-products which were formerly 
thrown into the streams that furnished the power 
for the machinery. We can say that advances 
quite as remarkable have been made in the use 
found for what once were regarded as by-products 
of the mind. Certainly the dream was regarded, 
particularly in the earlier days of science, as no 
better than a by-product of the mind. Just as 
the factory had to make a salable material out 
of its waste matter, in order to make up for the 
money formerly paid for carting away what had 
accumulated in the river, so the modern psy- 
chologist has, as it were, been forced to make 
something serviceable out of the dream. And he 
has done so in an extraordinary manner, the full 
narrative of which will some day be the most 
striking chapter in the history of science. 

The name given by Freud himself to the 
science is psychoanalysis, spelled also psychanaly- 
sis, or the analysis of the psyche. The psyche 
is not merely the mind regarded as a product, 
a stationary or crystallised object which can be 
cut and dried and labelled. The mind and soul 
and character and body as a connected, organic 
whole, and its functions (or what it does and how 
it changes), are the subject of psychoanalysis 
more than how its results or finite outward mani- 
festations can be classified. Psychoanalysis natu- 
rally suggests psychosynthesis as a more construe- 



8 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

tive procedure, and that is, indeed, the ultimate 
aim of psychoanalysis; not merely to take apart 
but to put together again, following a plan which 
is along the lines of the greatest usefulness to 
society. 

I should have been more exact, however, in the 
simile drawn above if I had said that the atmos- 
phere in which the latest psychological aviators 
have sailed so successfully is the Unconscious. 
For that part of the mind which before the 
science of psychoanalysis we knew almost noth- 
ing about, and which is unknowable except by 
means of this new instrument of precision, 
psychoanalysis, has been termed the Uncon- 
scious. 

The Unconscious is not to be regarded as the 
unknowing part of the mind but only as the 
unknown part. From one point of view there is 
no such thing as the unknowing part of the mind, 
because the mind is essentially that part of the 
personality that is knowing; knowing with greater 
or less intensity, and knowing now one and now 
another object, but always knowing something, 
from the first day of life until the last. But the 
Unconscious may be described as the generally 
unknown realms of the ego, into the seemingly 
bottomless abyss of which the sensations and 
perceptions of the individual are constantly sink- 
ing, and from which, no matter how hard we try, 



INTRODUCTION 9 

we cannot, without the help which analytic 
psychology offers us, recover anything except a 
very limited amount of visual, verbal or other 
memories. 

In this book an attempt is made to show the 
Unconscious operating in every act of our lives, 
not merely in the actions ordinarily known as 
unconscious or automatic, but in that part of our 
activity to which we attribute the most vivid con- 
sciousness. For in a certain sense we are most 
helped or hindered by the unconscious part of 
ourselves when we think we are most keenly 
alive. Our Unconscious pervades our conduct in 
the most minute details, just as the air we breathe 
is forced by our blood through our tissues, and 
it might almost be said that it is as important, 
and as great in extent, when compared with the 
conscious present, as the air, so small a part of 
which we breathe, is great in extent in propor- 
tion to the minute particles of it that we take into 
our lungs. 

In the spacious atmosphere of the Unconscious 
our dreams, both those of our sleep and those 
of our waking state, are but one form out of the 
multitude of varieties of the manifestations of 
the Unconscious. The present scope of psycho- 
analysis has extended far beyond the purely 
therapeutic one originally outlined by the founder. 
The psychoanalytic interpretation of human con- 



io MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

duct has been shown by many recent writers to 
be applicable to mythology, to sociology and to 
education, to mention only three out of the 
numerous spheres of human thought in which it 
illuminates what has before been dark. 

Much indignation has been expressed by some 
of Freud's critics because he has treated sexual 
matters in such an outspoken way. He has dis- 
cussed all matters that are generally considered 
sexual in a manner that these critics consider 
needlessly full and explicit, but he has done more, 
in that he has included a number of subjects as 
sexual which the ordinary person did not know 
were sexual; in order words, he is blamed for 
finding sexual reasons for a large proportion of 
human acts, a procedure which arouses the 
antagonism of many persons whose actions are of 
such a nature as to be very intimately touched by 
any reference to things purely sexual. But the 
fact remains, after all the emotions are removed 
from the discussion, that if certain kinds of 
behaviour have sexual causes, and we do not 
know it, we are being helped and not hindered 
by having the real nature of that behaviour 
pointed out to us. For example, if it has been 
repeatedly shown by analyses of many persons 
that a young unmarried woman's dream of a 
burglar entering her room is in most cases based 
on a crassly sexual desire of her Unconscious, it 



INTRODUCTION ir 

will certainly profit the young lady to be told not 
only that it represents a craving on the part of 
her Unconscious for the very thing that the 
dream pictures, and that the number of persons 
who know this fact is increasing every day, but 
also that it is not an uncommon dream of virgins 
and that it is absolutely no derogation to her 
character. But this is what Freud has done. He 
has told the ignorant and the innocent alike, with 
scientific impartiality, that they are ignorant of 
what goes on in their Unconscious and why they 
are ignorant and the results of their ignorance. 
It is of course not pleasant to learn of any defect 
in our knowledge, particularly that part of our 
knowledge which concerns the most personal rela- 
tions of our ego, and Freud and his followers 
have been reviled for their truth, even by those 
who are supposed to be in possession of the 
calmness and coolness coming from scientific 
work, with a vehemence which is born only of a 
strong need for defence. But the Freudians 
have shown that if we feel strongly that a cer- 
tain tenet needs vigorous defence we are admit- 
ting to ourselves that it is weak and cannot 
defend itself. Few persons think it necessary to 
defend what is accepted by many. No one would 
think of advocating the continuance of breathing, 
for instance. But if a seer of truths finds his 
fellows universally indulging in a habit which 



12 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

is both foolish and dangerous, foolish because 
conditioned by ignorance and dangerous because 
sapping the vital forces of almost all individuals, 
more insidious and more unknown than infantile 
paralysis, but infinitely more widespread, he will 
be opposed by the united strength of those who 
hear him, gradually tolerated by those who will 
listen to him and followed by those who under- 
stand him. 

In order not to offend persons who would 
close their ears if the sexual were mentioned in 
too plain terms, I have chosen to avoid as far as 
possible emphasising the " medical " or " ana- 
tomical " features of the topics treated, leaving 
the reader to infer that when among other expres- 
sions I may have occasion to mention " hunger ' 
I may be referring to the physical sexual crav- 
ing, and to make analogous inferences in other 
spheres. I have also used the word craving 
throughout in place of the Freudian word libido, 
which has for the American ear a connotation 
somewhat different from the European. 

Readers desiring to follow the subject of the 
Unconscious still farther are referred to the fol- 
lowing books in English: 

Adler: The Neurotic Constitution. 
Brill : Psychoanalysis. 



INTRODUCTION 13 

Bjerre : History and Practice of Psychoanalysis. 
Coriat: Abnormal Psychology. 

The Meaning of Dreams. 
Ferenczi : Contributions to Psychoanalysis. 
Freud : The Interpretation of Dreams. 

(Containing an extensive bibliography) 

The Psycho pathology of Everyday Life. 

Leonardo da Vinci. 

Wit and Its Relation to the Uncon- 
scious. 

Delusion and Dream. 
Frink: Morbid Fears and Obsessions. 
Healy: Mental Conflicts and Misconduct. 
Hitschmann : Freud's Theories of the Neuroses. 
Holt: The Freudian Wish. 
Jones: Papers on Psychoanalysis. 
Jung: Psychology of the Unconscious. 

Analytical Psychology. 
Pfister : The Psychoanalytic Method. 
Prince : The Unconscious. 
White : Mechanisms of Character Formation. 

One periodical in this country deals exclusively 
with psychoanalytic subjects : The Psychoanalytic 
Review, a quarterly edited by Smith Ely Jelliffe, 
M.D., and William A. White, M.D. 



CHAPTER II 

THE UNKNOWN ELEMENT IN ACTION 

A classical illustration of the power of the 
hypnotiser over his subject is the following: The 
hypnotiser tells the hypnotised person that when 
he awakes he will take a chair from the floor and 
put it on the table. He also tells him at another 
time that when he is awake, and at a certain hour, 
he will wipe his face with his handkerchief. 
What is most interesting to us here is, however, 
the answers that he gives to questions about why 
he did these things. He always has a plausible 
reason. He says that he found the chair in the 
way and wished to put it out of the way. Also 
he says that he found that his face was perspir- 
ing and that was why he wiped it with his hand- 
kerchief. The hypnotiser and the spectators in 
this little comedy are in the position of the gods, 
for they know the real cause of these actions and 
the deluded subject does not. He really thinks 
that the causes were as he stated, but we know 
whence came the idea which he carried out. In 
the world of everyday life we are all of us in 
much the same situation as the hypnotised sub- 

14 



UNKNOWN ELEMENT IN ACTION 15 

ject. It will be seen later that the hypnotiser in 
our everyday life is a part of our own selves, a 
very important and a very extensive part of our 
personalities. In a sense we are all hypnotising 
ourselves all the time. A section of our ego is 
the subject, a very small section indeed, and all 
the rest of our personality is the hypnotiser. In 
short, we are unaware of the real causes of why 
we act as we do in a great proportion of our 
daily life. We are directed to do this and that 
by the resultant states of mind which have ac- 
cumulated in the all-retentive storehouses of our 
subliminal memory and which we may truthfully 
say we have forgotten, though they are in our 
memory. They have been subject to retention, 
but are impossible of recall. The hypnotic state, 
in the illustration cited above, is a sort of rapid 
process of forgetting. The idea of putting the 
chair on the table was in the mind of the sub- 
ject all the time, so we may say that he remem- 
bered it. But it had passed out of his conscious- 
ness, and so we may say that he had forgotten 
it. Now, the case is about the same with all of 
us, except that instead of our rapidly forgetting 
some recent thing, we have gradually forgotten, 
in the same sense of having stored it away where 
it could not be called up at will, almost every- 
thing that we ever experienced. Thus we see 
that there is a discrepancy between our present 



1 6 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

thoughts and our present actions, which makes 
our actions so often seem, even to ourselves, so 
very inconsistent. 

Too much emphasis cannot be placed on the 
fact that the real causes of what we do in our 
acts from hour to hour are hidden from us and 
that the majority of assigned reasons are mere 
pretexts, the real motives being in the Uncon- 
scious, and therefore absolutely inaccessible to us. 
It is only after a thorough analysis at the hands 
of a trained analyst that anyone can gain an 
insight into the mechanisms that motivate not 
only our extraordinary but our ordinary acts. 
Our preferences for or avoidance of specific 
foods, occupations, pastimes and persons are as 
a rule never analysed by any except the specialist 
in psychoanalysis. Our motives remain in the 
Unconscious because they are asocial, — that is, 
destructive of the organisation of society, — and 
continue to be hidden from us before, during and 
after the performance of the act. " Forgive 
them, for they know not what they do " is quite 
as applicable to the everyday acts of everyday 
people as to the acts of those who crucified Christ. 

Jones, in his treatment of the subject of ration- 
alisation, which is the name he applies to the 
tendency of all of us to assign a conscious reason 
to the acts which are motivated by the wishes 
of the Unconscious, instances the choice of a 



UNKNOWN ELEMENT IN ACTION 17 

religious or political creed as a case where the 
real and the apparent motives are quite likely to 
be different. In the chapter on the unconscious 
factor in everyday life will be found examples of 
actions which seem unaccountable, and indeed 
are unaccountable except on the grounds of their 
having been motivated by the unconscious wish. 



CHAPTER III 

THE OEDIPUS MYTH 

If we think about what we have done we are 
rarely satisfied with it. We are much more likely 
to be satisfied with or to approve what we are go- 
ing to do. There is so frequently an indefinable 
dissatisfaction with what we have accomplished, a 
dissatisfaction which comes from a sense of not 
being able to know why we did all or at any rate 
a part of what we did. Why did we leave unmen- 
tioned, in a conversation with a friend, exactly 
the facts that we consciously most wished to 
mention? Why did we forget this person's name, 
or that person's existence? Why in general is 
our action so incomplete, compared with what we 
could have wished? What factor is it in our 
lives that has exercised control over us at a critical 
time, at a time when we had to act rapidly and 
almost without thinking? If we ourselves had 
known and had been able to get control over this 
part of ourselves which was the determining fac- 
tor in our action now under review, we should 
now be so much better satisfied with our actions. 
To all thinking persons it is evident that only a 

18 



THE CEDIPUS MYTH 19 

part of our actions from hour to hour are abso- 
lutely within our control. For instance, what we 
say. In a heated argument we all say things we 
do not feel altogether like backing up when we 
have cooled off a bit. 

In times of great excitement, in keenly vivid 
living, we all recognise that we are impelled by 
a power over which we do not have complete 
control. We are borne along by a force which 
we do not possess at the other times when we 
are not acting or thinking so keenly. In times 
of great stimulation we get an intense pleasure 
from the employment of large amounts of our 
strength, mental or physical, amounts of power 
that sometimes surprise us, for we did not know 
we had it, and which give us the feeling that we 
are drawing upon a source of power that at other 
times does not belong to us. There is even a 
doubt in our minds sometimes that the power we 
exercise in these exalted times is in reality not our 
own power, but belongs to some other than us. 
We do not know how we did it. It seemed that 
for a short time, at least, we had supernatural 
powers. Indeed, many have attributed, with 
characteristic human lack of logic, this particu- 
lar access of power to deity or to divine aid, 
as if implying that our ordinary everyday 
powers were not the manifestation of divine 
activity. 



20 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

At such times, then, which occur now and then 
during a life, we realise that we are ourselves 
raised to the wth power. The strength we put 
forth is primordial, primal, archaic. We are in 
perfect alignment with ourselves, every fibre of 
our physical being and every thought of our men- 
tal being seem to be in perfect order and func- 
tioning in completely organised coordination. We 
call upon the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, 
and they are with us and we have the strength 
of our fathers and of our ancestors to the wth 
generation. We all, too, know the other extreme, 
when we are doing our worst, when everything 
goes wrong, and the right hand is the enemy of 
the left, and we are at variance with ourselves, 
the struggle is within and not without. But I will 
not amplify here. 

Modern mental science has made the dis- 
covery, dimly foreshadowed though it may have 
been for centuries, that the combined mental and 
physical organism is in a large degree under the 
control of the Unconscious ; my conscious acts are 
controlled by my unconscious life, your waking be- 
haviour by the unknown Titan slumbering within 
you, every man's visible activities by the archaic 
past which in him still lives in the present. 

And it is predominantly archaic or primordial 
in strength and in trend, and in its universality. 
No one, no matter how refined, cultured, civilised, 



THE CEDIPUS MYTH 21 

escapes it. All children are admittedly primitive 
in their nature. Their primitive nature is rec- 
ognised in the newer systems of education which 
provide a curriculum running parallel with the 
supposed outgrowing of the primitive traits. It 
is given first the occupations and the amusements 
of the earliest prehistoric man, and the steps of 
advancing civilisation are followed in these sys- 
tems as if the child rehearsed in his own life the 
life of the race, and the savage was finally given 
up and replaced by the civilised man in him. Let 
me state here the latest findings of the newer 
psychology in this connection. The savage in the 
child, the archaic in man, still lives in him, but in 
that part of him which is called the Unconscious. 
It has not been replaced or supplanted, but has 
been overlaid or veneered with a partial civilisa- 
tion in some persons, and in a few has been 
secured for the service of society through a 
process of self-control, and has been almost trans- 
formed by a process of sublimation. In the 
majority of people, however, this veneer is only 
skin deep, and in all the actions of the less 
thoughtful and more instinctive, more impulsive 
men and women the archaic Unconscious may 
still be seen driving them to their general be- 
haviour and influencing them in their specific 
actions, according as their acts are more or less 
under the governance of the usages of conven- 



22 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

tional society or are, as so many of our actions 
still are, a matter of our own private personal 
life and do not appear in public, are not super- 
vised or censored, so to speak, by public opinion. 
In these private realms we do as we like, which 
is as the archaic Titan within us likes, provided 
only that we do not appear to do anything detri- 
mental to, or that seems detrimental to, our 
neighbours. It is there, in this private personal 
nature of ours, that we have most recourse to the 
manners and customs of our remote ancestors. 
In public, in the most cultured communities, our 
behaviour is such as to be of the greatest general 
service and widest validity for the home, the 
state and the nation. In our private lives, which 
a flattering self-complacency is pleased to call our 
individualities, we show those peculiarities, sup- 
posed to distinguish us from our neighbours, but 
which really do not, because they are the most 
determined by the archaisms of the Unconscious. 
There is a curious contradiction here. By all 
that is holy we respect individuality as if in indi- 
viduality or in being different * from our neigh- 
bour we possessed the only means of preserving 
ourselves intact as individuals. The greatest dif- 
ference, which by a certain form of reasoning 
assures the greatest individuality, is to be gained 

*The most appropriate place to be absolutely different irom 
other people is the insane asylum. 



THE CEDIPUS MYTH 23 

by doing that which is farthest removed from 
the conventional behaviour of society. This we 
cannot do in the sight of society. So we indulge 
our greatest eccentricity in private, having our 
peculiar habits of the most intimate personal 
nature, our pet superstitions which we keep to 
ourselves, our little formulae of eating, drinking, 
washing, dressing, writing, reading, working, 
playing. These we regard as the essential parts 
of our personality, essential because they differ- 
entiate us, as we think, from our fellows. But 
they do not separate us from the rest of humanity 
in that sense, for it is just here, in those regions 
of our personality in which we think that we are 
most free to indulge our own idiosyncrasies, and 
be ourselves and not anyone else, that we draw 
upon the universal humanity within us, the part 
that is common to us all, the part in which we 
differ from our neighbours less than in any other 
part. When apart, as it were, from society, and 
when freed for the time from the restraints 
imposed by our social relations, we are most 
under the control of that portion of our nature 
which has not yet been directed or mastered by 
society for the advancement of social organisa- 
tion. When we escape temporarily from the 
supervision of our social position, if our position 
in the social fabric may be said to supervise us, 
wz tend to return to the condition that we were 



24 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

in before social relations had begun to form 
restrictions on our behaviour. 

That is but saying that when the human finds 
himself in certain situations, he ceases to be a 
man and becomes a beast. Any panic demon- 
strates this. It also shows the infinite gradations 
of this civilisation as appearing in different per- 
sons. In a panic of almost any kind there will 
be those who keep their heads, whether because 
they have been experienced in this particular kind 
of emergency, such as firemen at a fire, or because 
they have in their relations with their fellow-men 
absorbed more humanity, more civilisation, which 
is the ability to be a citizen or to do work in 
cooperation with other people. Those in a panic 
who do not keep their heads but act instinctively, 
who rush madly for exits, and trample over 
others weaker than they, or who jump into life- 
boats, crowding out women and children, are for 
the time at least dominated by their Unconscious. 
That in great excitement we are unconscious of 
what, or of a good part of what, we do needs 
no proof. The unreliability of so much testimony 
of witnesses, even when under oath, especially 
when they are testifying about something done 
under great excitement, shows not only do we not 
fully know, at those times, what we do, but also 
that we do not know what we see. Losing one's 
head, losing one's control is like a vessel losing 



THE CEDIPUS MYTH 25 

its rudder or its helmsman, and drifting along 
just as the powers of nature draw it and quite 
irrespective of human direction or human aims, 
human ideas. Now, these powers of nature in 
the human individual are the powers of the Un- 
conscious, that ninety-nine per cent, of our psyche 
over which the most of us have secured no con- 
trol, and it is they who, when they are undirected, 
do so much damage to our entire personality, 
both the unconscious part of it and the conscious 
part. 

From these considerations the primordial, the 
archaic character of the Unconscious clearly 
emerges. The facts I have stated in the briefest 
possible form because they are so well known. 
But the application of them made by the newer 
psychology is the least evident to most persons 
and will require the most detailed treatment. 

We may state, as a preliminary, that every act 
of every man, woman and child is either social 
or asocial, that whatever we do we are either 
revealing through some trivial act the primordial 
power that resides within us, or tve are doing 
something positively constructive or destructive of 
the community in which we live; that is, none of 
our acts is without its effect, on ourselves and on 
our neighbours. If we are merely revealing or 
giving evidence of, or manifesting to those who 
nave the eyes to see, the fundamental powers that 



26 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

are ours (if we but learn to control them), we 
are doing a constructive work just in so far as 
the powers are perceived by other persons. We 
are, in that respect, dependent for our results 
upon the persons who know more than we do. 
Some see the enormous power of the human 
individual and they are stimulated by the sight, 
but it is only because they have been taught to 
see its manifestations in all the behaviour of their 
fellows. Now, the social acts are the acts that 
are determined by the directed thinking, and the 
asocial acts are those determined or caused or 
controlled by the undirected thinking, which is 
the Unconscious. 

But the social acts are a matter of evolution. 
What has been social for the last century was not 
social for the century before that, or as in the 
study of things human we are dealing with vast 
periods of time, we may have to say that what 
was of service to society a thousand years ago 
is not serviceable to society today. What was 
constructive a thousand years ago is constructive 
no longer but destructive of the social organism. 
For example, marriage did not exist in those 
archaic times. Sexual promiscuity was the rule. 
It could not have even been known what were 
the exact relations of persons within a tribe to 
one another. Fathers mating with their own 
daughters, mothers with their own sons, brothers 



THE GEDIPUS MYTH 27 

with sisters, were as inevitable as the analogous 
relations among barnyard fowls. But some mys- 
terious force is always at work among even the 
lowest type of tribal development, which tells the 
uncivilised that the mating of too close blood rela- 
tions is disadvantageous from a purely physical 
point of view, and a taboo arises, none of them 
knows how or why, during the course of the cen- 
turies, as they progress in the arts and learn to 
go abroad and meet and observe their neighbour- 
ing tribes; and the too close relationship in mat- 
ing is called by a name that is invented to express 
the conclusion thus reached by the tribe, that the 
promiscuity of sexual relations as affecting cer- 
tain blood relatives is undesirable, unsuitable, 
damaged, spotted. Now the word in one ancient 
language for this idea of polluted is Incestus. 
It was properly applied to a great many situa- 
tions in human life that might be described by 
the words " unclean, defiled, sinful, criminal." 
In the evolution of marriage, however, it has 
been restricted in its meaning, and specialised so 
that it now stands for a definite relation between 
relatives that the law, political or spiritual, 
considers too close. The father-daughter and 
mother-son mating and the brother-sister mating 
seem to have been the ones earliest taken excep- 
tion to, and the other degrees of nearness of blood 
relationship come in for restrictions in different 



28 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

countries at different times, and even at the same 
time, as is evident from the convention obtain- 
ing so long in the British Isles that prevented a 
man from legally marrying his deceased wife's 
sister. 

Now, the mating of father and daughter or 
the mating of mother and son has for a couple 
of thousand years at least been a matter for so 
great horror that an early Greek myth deals with 
the terrible fate that came to the man who even 
without knowing it married his mother. I refer 
to the story of CEdipus. For the purpose of 
refreshing the reader's memory and for present- 
ing the myth in only its essential form, which will 
exclude irrelevant details, I will reproduce it 
here, as follows: 

" After passing through the hands of the dram- 
atists the story assumed the following form: 

" Laius, son of Labdacus, King of Thebes, was 
warned by Apollo's oracle at Delphi that he was 
to die at the hands of his son. In spite of this 
warning Laius became by his wife Jocasta the 
father of a boy. When the child was born he 
fastened its ankles with a pin (whence the name 
1 swell foot ') and gave it to a faithful herdsman 
to expose on Mount Cithaeron. Ignorant of the 
oracle, the man in pity gave the child to the shep- 
herd of Polybus, King of Corinth, and that ruler, 



THE CEDIPUS MYTH 29 

who was childless, reared him as his own son. 
The young man, QEdipus, never doubted his 
Corinthian origin till the taunt of a drunken com- 
panion roused his suspicions, and, unable to ob- 
tain satisfaction from his supposed parents, he 
sought the oracle at Delphi, which did not 
answer his question, but warned him that he was 
doomed to slay his father and wed his mother. 
Horrified, QEdipus fled from Corinth, and 
shortly after, at a narrow place in the road, met 
Laius with his servants. They endeavoured to 
force him from the road, and in the quarrel he 
slew them all, as he supposed. Pursuing his 
journey, he found Thebes harassed by the Sphinx, 
who propounded a riddle to every passer-by and 
devoured all who failed to solve it. Creon, the 
brother of Jocasta, who had become king on the 
death of Laius, had offered the hand of his sister 
and the kingdom to him who, by solving the rid- 
dle, should free the city from the monster. 
QEdipus answered the riddle and thus slew the 
Sphinx. He then married Jocasta, his mother, 
and became king of Thebes. At first he pros- 
pered greatly and four children were born to him, 
two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, and two daugh- 
ters, Antigone and Ismene. At length a terrible 
pestilence visited Thebes, and the oracle declared 
that the murderer of Laius must be expelled from 
the country. CEdipus began the search, and 



30 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

by degrees the truth became known. Jocasta 
hanged herself and CEdipus put out his eyes." — 
International Encyclopedia. 

The pity and terror which Aristotle says purge 
our souls as we see on the stage the representa- 
tion of the myth, is caused, according to Freud, 
by the fact that in our Unconscious we feel that 
except for fate we might have suffered the same 
miseries as CEdipus, because every man has in his 
Unconscious a craving that has not been modern- 
ised, a craving that does not make even so fine 
a distinction between women, as that, for instance, 
between his mother and a woman his own age 
or younger. 

The CEdipus myth has been used in psycho- 
analysis as a measure by which to test the rela- 
tive development of the individual psyche. By 
means of the interpretation of a given person's 
dreams it is possible to tell how far his Uncon- 
scious has progressed along the line of evolution 
from the place where it desires the possession of 
the mother above all else in the world. It is 
shown by this method that the psyche of a great 
many persons afflicted with certain sorts of nerv- 
ous disorders has been subject to a fixation (as it 
is called) upon the mother. This applies, in 
strict literalness, of course only to men. But the 
corresponding unconscious mental state occurring 



THE CEDIPUS MYTH 31 

in women is quite as common if not commoner, 
and is sometimes known by the name of the 
Electra complex. A complex, as will be seen 
later, is a group of unconscious ideas, or rather 
a group of ideas in the Unconscious, which, hav- 
ing been subjected to repression, continues to 
have an independent existence and growth. The 
Electra complex is for women quite analogous 
to the GEdipus complex in men, so much so, in 
fact, that the name CEdipus complex is indiffer- 
ently used for both, the relations to be changed 
being understood. Thus, as the primary affec- 
tion on the part of the boy is for his mother 
and his earliest wish is to supplant the father in 
the affection of his mother, so the primary affec- 
tion of the little girl is for her father and she 
wishes above all things to supplant her mother 
in the regard of her father. These natural 
expressions of preference on the part of little 
boys and girls are quite familiar to all observant 
persons. The natural fondness for the parent of 
the other sex is even encouraged by some fathers 
and mothers. But we are in the study of the 
Unconscious not so much concerned with these 
conscious expressions of preference. The GEdipus 
myth, when used as a measure of the state of 
development of the psyche, refers only to the 
conditions of the Unconscious itself which are 
only faintly indicated in the conscious life, condi- 



32 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

tions which are impossible to test accurately with- 
out the instrument of precision supplied us by the 
dreams of the individual in question. So that 
when it is said that such and such a person shows 
an unconscious fixation of the GEdipus type, it 
does not mean that we have a right to be horri- 
fied as we should be at hearing that the child 
has an incest-wish, as it has been termed, for the 
parent of the opposite sex, but merely that there 
exists, in the Unconscious of the individual in 
question, a condition which corresponds to the 
archaic social conditions before society had 
stamped the mating of son and mother or father 
and daughter as incest. It should here be stated, 
however, that this CEdipus complex, while, as 
above remarked, it is only dimly indicated in the 
conscious life, has, nevertheless, far-reaching 
effects upon the behaviour and activities of the 
individual. 

The bearing of this fact upon the life of the 
individual man of today is most important. It 
is to be taken, however, in connection with 
another fact, namely, that the Unconscious, being 
so archaic, and so artless and so infantile, has 
the childlike characteristic of appearing in the 
infancy of the individual. Very young children, 
even infants, show this craving for the attention 
of the opposite sex. It is a necessity to the very 
existence of the infant to be extremely fond of 



THE CEDIPUS MYTH 33 

one woman. The forming of a strong attach- 
ment for the mother or the person who, in the 
absence of the mother, performs her duties is 
paralleled in a great many men by a fondness 
for the home where, after their own marriage, 
they get a revival of the services which their 
mothers used to render them. In the quiet and 
peace of the home the husband once more 
returns mentally to the situation where he is the 
recipient of nourishment and comfort from the 
same woman who has been the maker of his own 
body. It is no wonder if there is some rivalry 
between wife and mother-in-law, or between 
wife and mother, even though the mother is not 
physically present. The mother of the man 
stands in the same relation to the wife that a 
former wife would. In other words, it is never 
possible for a man to say to the woman he first 
wants to marry that he has never loved any other 
woman. Of course he can say it, but it will not 
be true. He has loved, and with an ardour that 
only a purely unrestrained infantile craving can 
create, a woman that must always be the rival of 
the wife unless this relation which we are now 
discussing has been satisfactorily settled either in 
or out of consciousness. If it is possible for a 
woman to be happy as the second wife of a man, 
it must be for the same reason as for a woman 
to be happy as the first wife of a man — that is, 




34 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

so far as it depends on the actions of the man. 
Because it will now be evident to the reader that 
there is a certain line of conduct conceivable in 
a husband that is more appropriate toward a 
mother than toward a wife, just as there is 
an appropriate motherly attitude in a mother 
toward her children which is singularly in- 
appropriate in a wife toward her husband. In 
other words, no matter what the moralisers in 
the evening papers say about the wisdom of the 
wife " mothering " her husband, it is a kind of 
action that is likely to cause the greatest unhap- 
piness for the reason that if a man wants a wife 
in the most modern sense and according to the 
most modern ideals, he wants her not merely as 
his cook and the mother and nurse of his chil- 
dren, not merely as his housekeeper, not merely 
as an auxiliary tailor with the special duties of 
sewing on buttons and mending holes, not merely 
as the performer of a vast number of duties 
almost anyone would be unable to recount, but as 
a spiritual and intellectual comrade of a kind 
different from the male companions he has in 
business and in the other relations of life. And 
no matter how much a man may respect and 
desire his mother, and all the comforts of home 
with which she supplied him, it is folly of the 
most arrant kind for a husband to look to his 
wife for things that are peculiarly maternal, 



THE CEDIPUS MYTH 35 

unless he wishes to place himself on the same 
level with his own children. Many men do. 
There are not a few who call their wives 
" Mother," or even " Mama." Possibly they 
think they do it solely to amuse or set an example 
to their children. We know, on the other hand, 
that the unconscious cause of this word's being 
used is that the psyche, just as water falls to its 
own level, tends to return to the situations of its 
least activity — that is, to the state just after or 
even before it was born, and is always pulling 
all of us, who do not overcome this tendency, in 
the direction of peace, of home, of mother, of 
rest, of inactivity, of Nirvana. Anything what- 
ever that suggests or is mentally associated with 
this tendency is seized upon by the Unconscious 
with unerring inevitability. This trait and a thou- 
sand others proclaim, to those who can under- 
stand the language, the attitude of the man not 
only in his business but in his home, and in his 
most intimate relations with his family and with 
himself. 

In short, every man has been and is by nature 
passionately in love with his mother, a love which 
is a consuming love and which because of its 
ecstatic quality is to colour for him his appercep- 
tion of every woman whom he sees subsequently, 
and in particular the woman whom he chooses 
for his life mate. As his mother was his first 



36 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

mate, he cannot look upon and judge a single 
other woman save by reference to and in com- 
parison with the woman who has been his ideal 
from the time he was able to distinguish one per- 
son from another. Every look, expression, tone 
of voice, touch and even odour (unconsciously, 
to be sure) is perceived by him through the 
medium of his memories of his mother or her 
surrogate (the nearest female person to him in 
his childhood, if by any chance his mother did 
not happen to be such). 

The greatest mystery in the world to some of 
us is what constitutes the attraction some people 
have for others. How this man of our acquaint- 
ance could ever have fallen in love with the 
woman he did passes our understanding. Some 
of us, too, have sometimes wondered how we 
ever could have been so fascinated by our own 
spouses, whether we be men or women, as to 
think that we should never tire of them. The 
folly of this or that attachment among our 
acquaintance is so clearly manifest to us, not 
merely the young lovers in the ardour of youth, 
whom we naturally expect to be hasty in their 
judgment, but even those whose passions have 
cooled off. But when looked at from the point 
of view that our knowledge of the Unconscious 
gives us, the causes of the preference are quite 
transparent. The psychoanalyst is able, through 



THE CEDIPUS MYTH 37 

interpretation of dreams and of other manifesta- 
tions of the Unconscious, to discover just what 
is the trouble in the most intimate of human rela- 
tions and to direct a course of action which will 
ameliorate or cure these troubles, some of which 
are attended not merely with mental but many 
with serious physical ills. 






j, 



CHAPTER IV 

THE FORE-CONSCIOUS 

No attempt is made by the newer psychology to 
give an exact definition of the Unconscious. But 
as in the case of many terms which are hard if 
not impossible to define, an approximation is 
made by specifying what these terms do not 
include. Now, in studying mental operations it 
is seen that there is a mass of mental material 
that, while not in consciousness at the time, may 
at will be summoned to appear before conscious- 
ness; in other words, there are facts, memories, 
mental images which we can recall whenever we 
desire to do so, and there are other facts, proper 
names being an excellent example, which, although 
they may not in every case be recalled when we 
want them, and even evince a perversity in 
sometimes not coming when they are called, occur 
spontaneously as it appears, and at times when 
we may be thinking of something very remote 
from any logical connection with them. I say 
advisedly very remote, for the reason that it will 
appear later that these ideas which seem to enter 
of their own accord are quite as closely connected 

38 



THE FORE-CONSCIOUS 39 

with the topics which are occupying our attention 
at the time as the others. The connection is not 
so much logical as it is psychological. 

Another illustration of the type of mental 
material which may be called up at will is the 
multiplication table. Others are the telephone 
numbers or addresses of more or less numerous 
friends or the brands and prices of several com- 
modities. We have them in mind — that is, in con- 
sciousness — whenever we want them and almost 
without fail, and dismiss them, and call up others. 
Of course there are times when, on account of 
our being disconcerted, we may not be able to 
remember these facts, at exactly the minute we 
desire to use them. But things like these are in 
and out of the mind day after day, with quite 
a reasonable degree of certainty, in much the 
same way as we can call up any one of a million 
or so of people on the telephone. 

Now, the name applied to those ideas, facts, 
images and other mental states which we have 
the power to call up at will, or that part of the 
mind where they are stored, is the Fore-conscious. 
It contains those thoughts and ideas which are 
available for ready reproduction, and which 
occupy our minds most clearly when we are not 
actively looking, hearing, tasting, touching, etc. 
These ideas of the fore-conscious are the only 
purely mental material, aside from real sensa* 



4 o MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

tions and perceptions, available for the most of 
us when we wish to do any voluntary thinking. 

The Unconscious, on the other hand, is that 
region of the mind where are deposited, and 
have been deposited since our birth (and some 
students of the mind think even before), all our 
experiences, not only those of last summer, for 
instance, every sight or sound that we perceived 
and every feeling that we had, but everything 
that has ever happened to us. Think of all the 
places our parents took us to before the time of 
the earliest memory we can rake up out of our 
earliest childhood! We cannot possibly recall 
them all, although they occurred at the most 
impressionable age, before we were five years old. 
There has been a gradual process of forgetting 
taking place, which in our present terminology 
we may describe by saying that these experiences 
have for a short time been in the fore-conscious, 
but have one by one dropped out of it. To con- 
tinue the telephone metaphor, we may say that 
connection has been cut off from those incidents, 
which are now comparable to the billions of 
humans who live their entire lives out of reach 
of any telephone lines whatever. They could 
be reached only by putting up poles and wires or 
by other expensive construction. 

For these ideas of the fore-conscious we need 
no inferential proof. By means of them we 



THE FORE-CONSCIOUS 41 

revive into conscious and experience again, in our 
own personalities, things that have occurred 
days, weeks, months, years ago. I have said 
that we can recall them at will, and also that they 
return spontaneously. Some are aroused in one 
of these ways, and some in the other. At any 
rate, that is the general opinion. How accurate 
this general opinion is may be inferred later 
when we come to discuss the origin of particular 
thoughts. But no one will deny that the ideas 
of the fore-conscious are what has been called 
immediate experience. In this respect they are 
as certain facts as are all our sensations and per- 
ceptions, of which indeed they have been called 
the copies. 

Kaplan * says : " We are forced to recognise 
the Unconscious, ' if we let conscious psychic 
phenomena pass not merely as an empty succes- 
sion of experiences, but wish to bring them into 
intimate relations in the same way that we con- 
nect the hourly increasing strokes of the hour on 
the clock intimately through the knowledge that 
they are the regular effects of a mechanism built 
and operating according to certain laws and at 
most only withdrawn from our perception.' We 
divide unconscious mental processes into two 
classes, those that are ' forgotten ' on account of 
their being ' uninteresting,' and those that are 

* Grundziige der Psychoanalyse, p. 81. 



42 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

1 repressed ' on account of their ' painful ' or 
even ' shocking ' nature. The psychic processes 
of the first class, containing all as yet unsettled 
thoughts or those not yet brought to a conclu- 
sion, are really ' unconscious,' but they may easily 
become ' conscious,' they are ' available for con- 
sciousness.' Those of the second class are in the 
highest degree unconscious, they may be called 
1 unavailable for consciousness.' For this reason 
Freud divides the unconscious into the ' fore- 
conscious ' and the absolutely ' unconscious.' The 
concept ' unavailable for consciousness ' is evi- 
dently a relative one, and denotes only the man- 
ner in which anything is experienced; the task of 
psychoanalysis, however, is to bring to conscious- 
ness the processes that are unavailable for con- 
sciousness. 

" The unconscious is not to be compared with 
the unreal or non-existent. From the above dis- 
cussion it is easy to understand this about the 
1 fore-conscious,' that is, the act of forgetting in 
the ordinary sense, and about the thoughts not 
carried to a conclusion. The same is true of the 
1 unconscious ' in the special sense of Freud. 
There are conditions where the complexes un- 
available for consciousness press forward into 
consciousness, but their belonging to the ego is 
disguised." 



CHAPTER V 

THE UNCONSCIOUS. (DESCRIPTIVE) 

On the other hand, the thoughts, ideas and 
wishes of the Unconscious are never directly 
called up voluntarily. They are neither subject 
to our volition nor do they make their appear- 
ance spontaneously. They are and remain for- 
ever inaccessible to ordinary consciousness. Their 
existence even is a matter of inference. They 
are described as being that portion of our mental 
states of which we may not have direct or im- 
mediate experience, but whose existence we may 
deduce from other facts. From certain mental 
diseases, from dreams, from mistakes in reading, 
speaking and writing, and from actions of the 
type which is called " symptomatic," we infer the 
existence of certain unconscious ideas and wishes, 
which we never directly experience as such, but 
whose effects upon our behaviour and even our 
specific acts are clearly demonstrable. Just as 
the astronomers in the days of low-powered 
telescopes deduced the existence of the planet 
Neptune from the motions of the other planets, 
motions which could be accounted for on no 

43 



44 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

other basis save the existence of a planet which 
they could not see, but which later astronomers 
have seen with telescopes of higher power, so 
psychoanalysis, relying only on the low-powered 
instrument of conscious thought, deduces the 
existence of certain features of the uncon- 
scious part of the psyche, features which are 
well known to it by their effects upon conscious 
thoughts and acts, but of which consciousness 
itself can have no direct and immediate experi- 
ence. 

And just as astronomy with its telescopes, and 
with its spectroscopes, has been able to give us 
exact information about a goodly proportion of 
the illimitable universe invisible to the naked 
eye, information the reliability of which no one 
doubts, so psychoanalysis, with instruments of 
precision, albeit purely mental and not material 
ones, has already, in the brief quarter of a cen- 
tury of its work as a science, given us informa- 
tion of the most stupendous and yet perfectly 
practical character about a portion of our souls 
of which we had before been in complete igno- 
rance, a vast illimitable realm which in extent may 
well be compared to the stellar universe in pro- 
portion to the circumscribed confines of our con- 
scious life. And the simile may be carried out 
in another direction, too. Just as we are im- 
pressed with a feeling of awe, as we look into 






COMPLETE RETENTIVENESS 45 

the depths of the heavens on a moonless, starry 
night, so do we experience a feeling of awe, and 
a sensation of being confronted with something 
of enormousness and immeasurable import when 
through the study of the newer psychology we 
face the infinite deeps of the human soul. 

A. Complete Retentiveness 

In much the same way as on a starry night 
our vision is filled with the countless numbers of 
the stars, and we think that, if our sight was keen 
enough, we should be able to see still others, and 
that possibly if keen-sighted enough we should 
see no black sky, nothing but stars, so we are 
impressed with the fact that the Unconscious is 
absolutely retentive of every experience that the 
individual has ever had. 

After study of the Unconscious in its various 
manifestations in everyday life and in dreams, 
we find that it is an ever retentive storehouse, in 
which is preserved everything that has entered 
the mind through all the avenues of sensation, 
both external and internal, that most of what we 
experienced has been forgotten, but, though for- 
gotten, is still operative in our minds, ever striv- 
ing to return to consciousness. We find that 
there is a restraining force which prevents most 
of our thoughts and feelings from reentering 



46 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

consciousness in their own true form, but that if 
sufficiently disguised they may elude that restrain- 
ing force, the censor,* and appear in other forms. 
We discover that the enormous vital power of 
the psyche, so large a proportion of which is 
unknown to us, is capable of an extraordinary 
degree of development which has been called its 
sublimation,t and that failing to find that sublima- 
tion in activities connected with life outside of 
us, the life craving turns inward toward the 
physiological processes of nutrition, reproduction, 
etc., and becomes the cause of the disordered 
functioning of the bodily mechanism. We are 
convinced of the fact that the constant vital crav- 
ing is manifested, too, in every act of our daily 
lives. These considerations will occupy us in the 
pages immediately following. 

No matter how trivial, every sensation and 
every perception of the individual psyche is stored 
in its original shape in the Unconscious. The 
appearance of everything we ever saw, the sound 
of everything we ever heard, the feeling of every- 
thing we ever touched, all these are registered, 
some say in the billion or so cells in the brain, 
like negatives on a photographic film. They 
almost always remain undeveloped, preserving 
their unconscious state forever. But they are 
sometimes developed " as the photographer's 

* See page 71. t See page 80. 



COMPLETE RETENTIVENESS 47 

fluid develops the picture sleeping in the collodion 
film. The oftenest quoted of these cases is 
Coleridge's : 

" ' In a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a 
young woman, who could neither read nor write, 
was seized with a fever, and was said by the 
priests to be possessed of a devil, because she was 
heard talking Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Whole 
sheets of her ravings were written out, and found 
to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, 
but having slight connection with each other. Of 
her Hebrew sayings only a few could be traced 
to the Bible, and most seemed to be in the 
Rabbinical dialect. All trick was out of the ques- 
tion ; the woman was a simple creature ; there was 
no doubt as to the fever ... At last the mys- 
tery was unveiled by a physician, who determined 
to trace back the girl's history, and who, after 
much trouble, discovered that at the age of nine 
she had been charitably taken by an old Protes- 
tant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose 
house she lived till his death. On further 
inquiry it appeared to have been the old man's 
custom for years to walk up and down a passage 
of his house into which the kitchen opened, and 
to read to himself with a loud voice out of his 
books. The books were ransacked, and among 
them were found several of the Greek and Latin 
Fathers, together with a collection of Rabbinical 



48 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

writings. In these works so many of the passages 
taken down at the young woman's bedside were 
identified that there could be no reasonable 
doubt as to their source ' " (James: Psychology, 
I, 681). 

Sporadic cases like this show clearly the pos- 
sibility of utter completeness of retention by the 
mind of almost every incident, no matter how 
apparently trivial and unimportant to the person 
retaining the memory. The fact that needs ex- 
planation, supposing that we are all equally reten- 
tive, is how it happens that some of our memories 
are selected for recall while others are by some 
influence rendered incapable of recall. Freud 
and his school have contributed an original 
answer to this question, an answer that will be 
indicated in the following pages. 

What strikes the thoughtful person at the 
outset of his study of the newer psychology is 
the recurrence of the phrases " unconscious 
thoughts," " unconscious wishes " and similar 
expressions. If he happens to be acquainted 
with the general position of philosophy up to the 
advent of the science of psychoanalysis, he will 
at once inquire how it is possible that there should 
be unconscious mental states of any sort. The 
definition of mind generally accepted up to the 
time of analytic psychology has made mind coex- 
tensive with consciousness. So that the term un- 



COMPLETE RETENTIVENESS 49 

conscious mental process will seem to him a 
contradiction. But the psychoanalysts have amply 
demonstrated that unconscious thinking not only 
takes place, but that it goes on all the time, 
whether we are awake or asleep. 

Freud (Traumdeutung, p. 450) says: " It is a 
striking peculiarity of unconscious processes that 
they remain indestructible. In the Unconscious 
there is no ending, there is no past, there is no 
forgetting. We are most strongly impressed with 
this when investigating the neuroses, especially 
hysteria. The insult that occurred thirty years 
ago, once it has won its way to the unconscious 
sources of the affects, works the entire thirty 
years like a new one. As often as its memory is 
touched it revives and is shown to be possessed 
of an excitability which at one stroke produces 
motor disturbance. Exactly here is where psy- 
chotherapy comes in. It is its task to produce for 
the unconscious processes a discharge and a 
forgetting. Therefore what we are inclined to 
consider self-explanatory and account for as a pri- 
mary influence of time upon the mental memory 
residues, namely the paling of memories and the 
weakness of affects of impressions no longer 
fresh, are really secondary transformations which 
are brought about by laborious effort. It is the 
fore-conscious which performs this work, and 
psychotherapy can take no other course than sub- 



50 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 
jecting the Unconscious to the control of the fore- 



conscious." 



B. Repression 

The real causes of our behaviour are hidden 
from us, as is shown by the fact that the things 
we thought we had forgotten are not completely 
destroyed. And the reason they seem to be for- 
gotten is that they no longer occur to us. They no 
longer occur to us because they have been re- 
pressed, and carry with them into the Unconscious, 
as they are repressed, other things which are men- 
tally associated with them. This repression is so 
nearly perfect that it may be said that most of our 
experiences have sunk into oblivion. Ordinarily, or 
as we might say normally, they cannot be awak- 
ened when once they have lapsed into the Uncon- 
scious. And there is a very good reason for this, 
— namely, that the power that has done the re- 
pressing is still at work continuing the repression, 
and making it more and more permanent as time 
goes on. 

In order to account for the state of anything, 
we are obliged to frame a theory of the manner 
in which that thing came into existence. Our 
modern attitude toward nature is not as it once 
was. Modern science is not satisfied with barren 
labelling and ticketing and dividing into classes 
according to the presence or absence of a certain 



REPRESSION 51 

quality. The most modern trend of scientific 
thought is to make a theory and then make it 
work, if possible. If it does not, we give it up, 
and try another. The path of the progress of 
science is paved with abandoned theories. It is 
quite possible that many of the present theories 
will be given up for better ones. The Unconscious 
is a theory proposed for the explanation of a 
great many phenomena of mental life, and an- 
other is that concerning the prime mover of 
human action. This prime mover of human ac- 
tion is called by Bergson the elan vital, by Jung 
horme, by Freud libido. The name which I have 
used in this book is the Craving, proposed by 
Putnam as the best English equivalent of the word 
libido. It is the power which many have called 
love. Each name has its defects, and I have only 
chosen the one which seemed to me to have the 
fewest. 

These two theories — first, that a large part of 
our mental life is unconscious (unknown or un- 
knowable), and second, that a creative force, by 
whatever name it may be called, is constantly im- 
pelling all animate life — have been used together 
in working out the science of psychoanalysis. 
The prime mover of the human soul, then, is its 
continual Craving for Life, for Love and for 
Action. Its craving for Life is easily understood, 
for without it the individual would seek annihila- 



52 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

tion with as much eagerness as the ordinary 
person seeks to continue his life. Our conscious 
life is generally little troubled by definite thoughts 
of our processes of maintaining our physical or- 
ganism. We all want our three or four meals a 
day and are more or less impossible if we do not 
get what we want to eat where and when we want 
it, and in sufficient quantities to make us feel geni- 
ally satisfied. Few of us that are not troubled 
with dyspepsia ever give our food another 
thought after we have eaten it, and that is quite as 
it should be. Some of us do not know where our 
stomachs or our hearts or livers are, and in truth 
it is really no business of ours to be thinking of 
such things. For all these processes, the finished 
product of aeons of evolution, are the business of 
that part of the Unconscious which has been 
called the biochemical level. Of course we all 
have been acquainted at some time or other with 
people (some men, but more women) who, to use 
an old-fashioned expression, " enjoy poor health. 1 ' 
These people do, possibly through no fault of 
their own, get to thinking after a slight illness 
about what is the cause of it and how their various 
digestive organs work, and so on. " So on " 
comprises the fact that such people frame gro- 
tesque theories as to the physiological processes 
that have been temporarily thrown out of gear, 
theories which the newer psychologists, the medi- 



REPRESSION 53 

cal school, have called not without a dry humour 
" phantasies." 

If the Unconscious were satisfied to stay at the 
biochemical level mentioned above we probably 
should not ever have discovered its existence, and 
the child's questions about where we are when we 
are asleep or where our thoughts are when we are 
not thinking them would either have been un- 
answered or would continue to be answered in the 
historically evasive way. But the Unconscious, 
craving not only to live but to love and to act, has 
pervaded our every thought and action, and con- 
trols us, a mysterious unseen power that has 
escaped detection until this twentieth century. It 
has been faintly guessed at even from the time of 
the earliest Greek philosophers, but now the 
psychoanalysts have begun to examine it in the 
laboratory and apply the methods of modern 
science to it. 

Why, then, can we not recall the greater part 
of our past experiences? Because they are re- 
pressed. Why, then, are they repressed? Be- 
cause of the controlling power of the Uncon- 
scious, which permits only a dim glimmer of light 
to filter through the curtain of the past. It will 
naturally occur to the reader that all this seems 
to imply a purpose on the part of the Unconscious. 
An indefinite desire it is, but not a purpose. We 
are forced to infer that the Unconscious, called by 



54 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

us the Titan, thinks in its elemental way, and in 
archaic modes, and is satisfied with broad and 
primal gratifications. We have seen this in re- 
gard to the nutritive functions, as indicated above. 
The mode of thought governing this Titan 
which plays so important a part in the affairs of 
men may be described somewhat as follows: It 
gets great satisfaction from a feeling of superior- 
ity, of greater strength or power, when comparing 
itself with other individuals. In fact, it seems al- 
ways to be comparing itself in point of power with 
some other fellow-being, mostly human, of its en- 
vironment. If, then, it succeeds in demonstrating 
to itself its superiority in any given situation, all 
well and good. It tries to make this situation per- 
manent. But if, on the other hand, it finds itself 
in a situation where it is at a disadvantage, it 
does two things, frequently both at the same time. 
It ignores as far as possible, and it would amaze 
the reader to learn how far that is sometimes, all 
the circumstances surrounding such a demonstra- 
tion of inferiority, abolishing the situation to- 
gether with myriads of associations connected with 
it. It is much as if a sculptor, seeing that his statue 
was inferior to some other artist's, or even think- 
ing erroneously that it was inferior, should de- 
stroy it, together with the studio in which it was 
modelled and all the materials and modelling 
tools. The other thing that the Unconscious Ti- 



REPRESSION 55 

tan does in such a situation is to seek immedi- 
ate satisfaction for his disappointment in some 
activity generally much lower in the moral scale. 
The sculptor demolishes his statue, burns up his 
studio, and gets beastly drunk himself. As a mat- 
ter of fact, every drink of alcoholic liquor that is 
drunk in the world, or has ever been drunk, has 
been imbibed for exactly that reason. The same 
remark applies to all the drugs of stimulating or 
narcotic character, particularly when their use has 
become a habit. A stimulating drink is taken 
admittedly for the purpose of driving away dull 
care, of forgetting unhappiness, of increasing the 
sense of power. It does increase the sense of 
power, but it very soon decreases the power itself. 
In increasing the sense of power, which is purely 
subjective, it thus makes a direct appeal to the 
imagination, and solely to the imagination, of the 
drinker. In making an appeal to the imagination 
it drives the drinker to the baleful resource of 
gaining his satisfactions from himself and not 
from his effective work upon the world of reality 
outside of himself. This, as will be seen later, is 
driving the drinker back to his own infancy, when 
he had no cares and when all his wants were sup- 
plied to him from his mother. In this sense all 
drinking of stimulating liquors is a projecting of 
oneself back to the days of his first drink at his 
mother's breast, or its successor or substitute, the 



$6 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

rubber-nippled bottle. The drinker is still, as he 
was when a baby in years only, fond of his bottle. 

Now, the feeling of inferiority, which is the 
source of the most painful mental states that we 
experience, is a matter of comparison, of judg- 
ment; and the Titan within us judges very 
roughly. It is pathetic to learn of the low esti- 
mate that some very good workmen place upon 
their productions. But the fact that concerns us 
here is that the action or performance, whether it 
was really good or bad, acquires the quality of 
being too terrible to be borne, and, as it is too 
terrible to be borne, the mind refuses to think of it 
and begins actively to abolish it and the memory 
of it. It is perfectly patent that we do not like 
places where we have suffered defeats of various 
kinds, and we naturally return to localities where 
we have had a good time. In the one place every 
sight recalls the defeat, and the unpleasant feel- 
ings originally aroused by it are revived, and in 
the other place we are reminded of the pleasures 
and gratifications we have had there. 

In short, what determines the repression, or 
the banishing of memories and thoughts associ- 
ated with them, is the sense of intolerability that 
is awakened. It is quite surprising to learn what 
things are regarded as intolerable by some per- 
sons, not merely those who are mentally abnormal 
but those who are in every other respect absolutely 



REPRESSION 57 

wholesome humans. For the drinker the intoler- 
able thing is that he may have to go without that 
feeling which the drink produces in him. The 
fact, too, that the intolerable thing to the drinker 
is the absence of a certain subjective feeling, de- 
rived from a process of doing a species of violence 
to himself, places his act at once in the class of 
solitary vices, no matter how many of his fellow- 
infants he may be practising it with. A room full 
of opium smokers is another instance of this same 
retirement into the subjective world, apart from 
their fellows, no matter how gregarious they 
might look to a casual observer. 

The Unconscious, then, represses what seems 
intolerable to it, the standard of tolerability being 
very different in different individuals. Moreover, 
it constantly resorts to any means whatever by 
which it may gain a feeling of superiority, and in 
this its methods are bizarre and grotesque, not to 
say weird. They have a continual tendency to 
be or to become petty. In a crowded city street 
it is a custom of the drivers, mostly of business 
wagons, if they see a man walking across the 
street in front of them, to whip up their horses 
and try, not to run over him, but to make him 
jump out of the way. In so doing they produce 
an immediate visible effect on a person whom they 
could not command with words. Another in- 
stance of the same satisfaction derived by a sim- 



58 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

ilar petty act was confessed to me by an educator 
who had recently bought a Ford car. His diffi- 
culties in managing to learn to drive it were more 
than offset, apparently, and any sense of inferior- 
ity was fully compensated for, by the immense joy 
he derived from seeing men, women and children 
jump and start back when he sounded his horn ! 
Of course it may be said that he was conscious 
that he enjoyed the sensation of seeing the people 
jump at the sound of his horn, but he surely would 
not have mentioned it with such glee, if he had re- 
flected that he was taking a petty satisfaction from 
the power with which the possession of the horn 
furnished him, as a compensation for awkward- 
ness in the management of his new automobile. 
And this is an educator, a man not only in the 
full possession of all his faculties, but a cultivated 
gentleman of power and refinement. Do we 
wonder that ignorant drivers of horses like to 
show their power? 

Another instance. Did you ever hand any- 
thing to a person at that person's request and 
have him or her accidentally (?) and quite in- 
nocently look away at just the minute you were 
handing it to her or him? A gentle reminder 
that you are still proffering it produces a sudden 
start in that person, and an apology, more or less 
feeble. But reflect on the situation. What does 
it mean to the Unconscious of the offending per- 



REPRESSION 59 

son? It means that It, the Titan belonging to 
that sort of irritating person, or perhaps to whom 
that person belongs, is taking a satisfaction from 
the fact that as long as you stand holding the ob- 
ject you are Its servant; and you will notice 
that very perverse people will prolong such a situ- 
ation just as far as they can. I purposely take 
examples of petty actions, because they are gen- 
erally so unconscious. There are a great number 
of conscious perversities in people coming from 
downright meanness of character that I do not 
need to describe, such as continued refusal to 
give you a thing you ask for and have a right to, 
and many other actions. The conversational 
bore is one who takes his satisfaction, which means 
exerting a kind of power, which again means cre- 
ating and maintaining a situation in which he in 
a certain sense becomes your superior, in using his 
word-making apparatus simply and solely for the 
purpose of commanding your attention. 

One of the sources from which the infantile Un- 
conscious draws its sense of power, which it 
needs must draw in order to get the satisfaction 
derivable from the removal of the sense of infe- 
riority, is from simple negativism. It is pointed out 
in another place that the mere negation of a prop- 
osition is of no psychological value whatever. A 
mere verbal contradiction is psychologically equiv- 
alent only to a complete repetition of the idea 



6o MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

adding a negative sign to it. It really does not 
change the proposition at all. It accepts the 
statement in toto without variation. The nega- 
tive is no variation on any theme. Similarly with 
negativistic acts. If, told to do something, a child 
does exactly the opposite, it is more than half 
accepting the suggestion. A more complete re- 
jection of the suggestion would be to do some- 
thing of an entirely different nature. The most 
complete rejection of any verbal suggestion is 
totally ignoring it and talking about something 
else, illustrated by the boy who was scolded by 
his teacher, and remarked in a perfectly unruffled 
tone that he had observed that the teacher's upper 
jaw did not move while she was speaking. Thus 
complete diversion is seen to be the only form of 
psychological negation possible. This is prac- 
tised by skilful handlers of their fellow-men, who, 
realising, though perhaps only unconsciously, that 
a contradiction is only a following of the sug- 
gestion of the other person but with a negative 
sign, so to speak, succeed in pleasantly instilling 
their own ideas into the minds of others, at the 
same time persuading them to believe that they 
are desirable. 

All these modes of behaviour on the part of civ- 
ilised and more or less educated persons show the 
working of their Unconscious even in their small- 
est acts. Some of them know, possibly, that they 



REPRESSION 6 1 

are examples of bad habits or impoliteness, but 
they are mostly unable to change, because the un- 
conscious satisfaction that they derive puts them in 
a good humour with themselves, and the effort to 
accomplish the contrary produces a strange un- 
easiness in them which they do not understand 
because they do not know of the implications which 
I have outlined above. 

Complete retention, therefore, of all experi- 
ences, and equally complete repression of all ex- 
periences that are not needed for the performance 
of our everyday duties, are what characterise the 
Unconscious on the passive side. A blind desire 
which consciousness is perpetually directing to- 
ward higher aims and which the Unconscious is 
ever tending to drag down to the archaic level is 
the salient quality of the Titan on the active side. 
When I spoke above of experiences that are not 
needed for the performance of our everyday 
duties, I referred to the essentially perfunctory 
way in which so many of us get through our daily 
work. From one point of view it appears that if 
we could keep in the fore-conscious, within easy 
call, a goodly number of our fortunate experiences 
for inspiration and illumination we should be so 
heartened by them that every act throughout the 
day would be a triumph of joy. It would seem as 
if the rule ought to work both ways.- If the Uncon- 
scious succeeds in banishing past events and the 



62 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

emotions connected with them, why should it not 
invite and entertain the pleasant memories, to 
cheer us on our way? To a certain extent it does 
this, to be sure. 

Here we come upon the third main point that 
we have continually to bear in mind as a character- 
istic of the Unconscious. It has been shown that 
the repressions consist of repressed ideas, scenes, 
sounds and what not, and repressed emotions. 
From the time of Achilles sulking in his tent on 
account of losing Chryseis as his part of the booty, 
down to the time of Mr. Wiggs of the Cabbage 
Patch, who went out into the woodhouse and 
swore at the wood, which mightily relieved his 
feelings, men and particularly women have either 
vented their wrath, which has been good for their 
health if not for that of others, or have swallowed 
their feelings, a procedure that has never done 
them any good, but has perhaps spared their 
friends and relatives. Now, the repression of the 
emotions is the ultimate cause of the repression — 
that is, the forgetting — of the ideas. The venting 
of the wrath symbolises the getting rid of almost 
any kind of deleterious material from the system. 
The happiest individuals on the whole are those 
who can work off all their uneasinesses, not to say 
their diseases, by appropriate actions. But the re- 
quirements of modern civilised society are such 
that we frequently have to repress the frank ex- 



REPRESSION 63 

pression of our emotions. The history of the 
repressed emotion is what now concerns us. For 
it has been discovered by the newer psychology 
that these repressed emotions are merely driven 
back, down into the Unconscious. They do not 
abate a jot or tittle of their intensity, but rather 
keep on growing. In extreme cases, instead of re- 
maining a branch as it were of our own person- 
ality, our " queer streak," they form independent 
individualities of themselves, so that we have, in 
our supposedly one Ego, two or more person- 
alities. 

This is what I might call the distracted Soul. 
We are all more or less distracted. The line be- 
tween what is called sanity and what is called 
insanity is, as everyone well knows, almost, if not 
quite, impossible to draw. We are distracted in a 
mild degree, of course, if we try to play the piano 
and talk at the same time, unless we are pretty 
good players, or if at a social gathering we try to 
listen to two conversations at the same time. 
These are, however, but intellectual distractions. 
The emotional one is what comes from a sorrow 
or a disappointment buried in the Unconscious. 
For in the Unconscious it is alive and not an- 
nihilated, and what is worse it is in your Uncon- 
scious and no one's else and playing havoc with 
your mind and soul and with that of no one else 
but yourself. The sights and sounds that we have 



64 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

seen and heard would of themselves do no mis- 
chief if it were not for the emotions that they are 
so closely bound up with. It is somewhat as if 
we found a waste-basket on fire, and instead of 
putting out the fire we carefully put it up attic or 
down cellar and shut the door and locked it, per- 
haps threw away the key ! But that is what we do 
when we repress emotions. It damages our house 
if it does not burn it down. Possibly the fire 
department or the doctor is called in, as the case 
may be, and saves some part of our physical or 
mental edifice. But we were only an ignorant serv- 
ant and knew no better. 

So it appears that we have to conceive of for- 
getting in a new way. We naturally speak of for- 
getting some things as if by so doing we could put 
them out of existence. We think that by keeping 
an unpleasant experience or an unfortunate one 
out of mind we can make it as if it had never been. 
On the other hand, I have said above that many 
of the experiences of the past are banished to the 
Unconscious in such a way that it is impossible to 
reawaken them. And there seems to be a sort of 
contradiction in these two statements. But the ex- 
periences that are banished to the Unconscious are 
forgotten by our conscious mind. They have been 
pushed down from the fore-conscious into the Un- 
conscious, and they are " forgotten " by the 
former but not by the latter, which is unable to 



INDEPENDENT VITALITY 65 

" forget," in that sense, anything at all. So when 
we say that we have forgotten or buried a memory 
of a sorrow or a disappointment, we can really 
mean only that we have exiled it from the fore- 
conscious, whence it would have an easy access at 
all times to our conscious life, and might em- 
barrass us by inopportune emergence at awkward 
times, to the Unconscious, whence it never emerges 
at all, at least in its original shape. 

C. Independent Vitality 

The real causes of our conduct are concealed 
from us, continually, because the mental states, 
repressed into the Unconscious by virtue of the un- 
pleasant feelings originally associated with them, 
— in other words, the unpleasant or painful feeling 
tone which the experiences had at the time, — are 
undergoing a continuous development below the 
level of consciousness. For while the experience is 
" forgotten," is banished to the dark realm of the 
Unconscious, it has, as we have seen, lost none of 
its independent vitality, but it continues to de- 
velop, and what is still more important for us, it 
keeps on influencing us, indirectly, to be sure, and 
in dark and hitherto mysterious ways. The prin- 
ciple of the conservation of matter in the science 
of physics declares that no atom is ever destroyed. 
Shapes that we have seen are seen no more, and 



66 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

the molecules of matter that formed the substance 
of what we saw have been broken up and have 
taken other shapes, but the atoms composing them 
have only been differently arranged in space and 
have lost none of their substance or proper activ- 
ity. We may posit a similar conservation prin- 
ciple in psychic life. The experience is as it were 
destroyed, forgotten, banished from recollection. 
It is as if burned up and transformed into gases 
and ashes. But if it can no longer enter our minds 
in its original form, it nevertheless can and does 
affect our lives and actions in another form. In 
some shape it is perfectly and completely con- 
served. It can and does enter our lives under 
various disguises. 

The real causes for the particular acts of our 
everyday lives are hidden from us, because they 
are not available for presentation to consciousness 
in their crassly archaic forms. The manners and 
customs of some of our ancestors not so very re- 
mote would shock our present-day sense of pro- 
priety. From the extremely archaic impulses 
which daily emanate from the Unconscious our 
gaze is necessarily averted. Yet in order to enter 
the light of consciousness their nature has to be 
apparently changed. They are ceaselessly strug- 
gling to enter consciousness because of their super- 
abundant vitality. Similiarly the occurrences in 
our own lives which are so painful or unpleasant 



SYMBOLISM 67 

that our consciousness shrinks from them at the 
time we first experience them are still retained in 
the Unconscious and are continuously striving for 
an outlet into the consciousness. They do not 
succeed in doing so until they have been trans- 
muted into a form in which our conscious sensi- 
tiveness no longer recoils from them. 

D. Symbolism 

The disguises under which the Unconscious 
presents to our conscious lives the experiences 
that have been repressed on account of their pain- 
ful qualities have been studied by psychoanalysis 
under the name of symbols. A symbol in the ordi- 
nary sense is merely an emblem like the national 
flag, or a trademark, which represents in the one 
case some sentiment such as patriotism, and on 
the other hand a certain standard of excellence in 
making of a kind of goods. But a symbol in the 
newer sense is an idea which takes the place of the 
ideas that have become too painful to be borne by 
the conscious life, and so to speak represents in 
consciousness the idea that is buried in the Uncon- 
scious. It is a sort of euphemism, or speaking of 
an unpleasant fact by means of a word generally 
having pleasant associations. In the newer sense, 
too, the symptom of a disease is sometimes also a 
symbol, as for instance when the fear of crossing 



68 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

open places is seen to be the symptom of the 
mental disease called hysteria, and symbolises a 
fear of quite a different sort which is in the Un- 
conscious, and never appears above the threshold 
because too terrible to be faced consciously. 

It is thought by some of those doing research 
in psychoanalysis that the symbol in this sense is 
always the substitute in consciousness for a 
thought or group of thoughts or feelings which 
are unable to enter consciousness themselves, 
but which find a vicarious admittance into our 
waking life through the symbols. If, then, it is 
found that a large proportion of our thoughts and 
actions not to say physical conditions, are sym- 
bols or substitutes for something of which we are 
totally ignorant, then certainly it will be evident 
that the more we can learn about their real mean- 
ing (which is the things that they only stand for 
and themselves are not), the better we shall un- 
derstand human conduct in general. 

Pfister tells of a girl who was troubled with 
chronic constipation. Her duties about the house 
became excessively unpleasant to her. The psycho- 
analysis to which Pfister, her pastor and teacher, 
subjected her revealed the fact that what she hated 
worse about her housework were activities con- 
nected with cleaning and dusting. She could not 
tell why this was so, but when it was suggested to 
her that her dislike of cleaning and dusting the 



SYMBOLISM 69 

house was but an outward symbol of the same wish 
which made her constipated, and that the cleaning 
of the house symbolised the cleaning of her own 
intestinal tract, she took hold of the proposition 
with a will, and all her difficulties came to an end. 
Her wish not to be clean in one respect is analo- 
gous to the wish not to be clean in another. She 
knows both circumstances, but is not aware of the 
connection between them. But when told by the 
analyser that the constipation was not an isolated 
affair, but was in direct causal connection with her 
unwillingness to do cleaning work in other direc- 
tions, the whole thing took on a new appearance 
and she saw the domestic laziness as a symbol of 
another form of disinclination. 

If an experience which has been a terrible shock 
to any one of us, and the feelings and emotions 
associated with it have not at the time of the ex- 
perience been allowed for some reason to find 
their natural outlet in action or in a recourse to 
human sympathy and understanding, if such an 
experience is repressed, there results a condition 
much like a boiler generating steam, but with no 
work being done, no outlet except the safety valve. 
The fire of our animal vitality goes right on gener- 
ating more and more steam. The energy issues 
from the safety valve in amorphous clouds, in- 
stead of the formal and definite reciprocation of 
the piston and the smooth and regular turning of 



70 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

the wheels. The symbols are the safety valve's 
outrush of steam. To carry the simile one step 
farther, we may say that the human machine, here 
compared to a steam boiler, has (or itself forms) 
many safety valves, each one of them a different 
group of symbols, if, and only if, the engine which 
it is designed by its maker to set in motion be 
either cut off or be too small to use up all the 
energy generated in the boiler. As an example of 
steam power cut off from its engine, take the 
case of a business man who retires and does not 
find employment for his faculties, or the lover 
who has lost his mistress. Each must find another 
absorbing interest or perish, at least mentally. 
Of course there are physiques that go on for 
years as merely physical organisms, without per- 
ceptible mentality more than is enough to keep 
them eating, dressing and undressing. 

This is, to be sure, but a very broad statement 
about symbols, and is necessarily extremely in- 
definite. To go into details here, for instance, as 
to the reason why i signifies male, 2 female, why 
red is sometimes masculine while at other times 
blue is the masculine colour, would require too 
much space in the present treatment of the 
subject. 

Here, however, it should be remembered chiefly 
that any idea, thing or action may become, as in 
fact all things have become, for all of us, a con- 



THE CENSOR 71 

scious symbol (or, a symbol in consciousness) for 
another idea or emotion or group of ideas or emo- 
tions which have been repressed into our Uncon- 
scious because they are themselves regarded by us 
as too terrible to be faced consciously. This is 
the cause of so many pleasant, not to say comical, 
euphemisms for the idea of death, such as " kick- 
ing the bucket," " turned up his toes to the 
daisies," etc., and it is the cause of our dreams 
being so apparently nonsensical. 

E. The Censor 

The real causes of our daily behaviour are con- 
cealed from us. If, as Kaplan says, we regard the 
Unconscious and the Conscious as separate locali- 
ties, there is a boundary between them across 
which the wishes of the Unconscious have to pass 
before attaining the light of conscious life. At 
this boundary line there is situated an inhibitive 
power preventing these unconscious wishes from 
passing unless they are masked by the symbolisms 
referred to in the preceding section. 

Under the influence of the human society in 
which we live we do many things and we avoid 
doing many other things. It is shown by psycho- 
analysis that the combined effect of the interests 
of all the people with whom we live in relations 
of greater or less amity is represented, so to spea> 



72 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

by a deterrent force residing in our ego and pre- 
venting us from stepping outside of the bounds of 
propriety. This deterrent force was compared 
by Freud to a censor. Just as a censor of some 
government (in our present metaphor, the con- 
scious) goes over the letters and communications 
of other kinds that come from some other nation 
or from all other nations (here the Unconscious), 
and excises certain parts of the printed or written 
matter, in the same way the so-called psychic (or 
endopsychic) censor reviews the ideas which are 
constantly being sent up from the underworld of 
the Unconscious, and prevents them from entering 
consciousness except in a form that is unrecog- 
nisable by the conscious part of our ego — namely, 
in the form of symptoms and other symbols. The 
Unconscious thus keeps on delivering its messages 
to us, messages which are mostly to the effect that 
it wishes to live, love and act in archaic modes, 
according to which it has evolved through the 
ages. But these modes are in conflict with the 
progress of human society, and the result is that 
the hundreds of thousands of years of ancestry 
behind us have to be in a sense curbed and re- 
strained or the manners and morals which may 
have been the best in prehistoric times will, and 
constantly do attempt to, assert themselves in the 
actions of persons living today. Right here it is / 
interesting to note that the newest theory of in- 



THE CENSOR 73 

sanity is that insanity is the regression of the mind 
back to prehistoric modes of thought. There is 
no doubt that if a paleolithic man could be revived 
and paraded on Broadway, Broadway would 
think him, and would be obliged to think him, 
completely insane. He could not talk " United 
States," and just think what he would do ! So 
that it seems quite reasonable to suppose that 
people of today who lose their minds, as it is 
called, do nothing else than revert to a mental 
state that was useful in archaic ages, but which 
society of the present day is obliged to shut up to 
keep from injuring themselves and other people. 
And here we see why the line between sanity and 
insanity is so hard to draw, because some of us 
revert only a few years or a few centuries, while 
others go back farther, and we see in this way that 
the only criterion of sanity is usefulness to society, 
the person being most insane who is least avail- 
able for the work demanded of him by society, 
and least " out of his head " who can carry on 
some work that his position in economic society 
requires of him. This is only another way of 
saying that the actions of such a person are more 
or less uncensored. Why is a person called eccen- 
tric or " queer " ? Because he cannot do something 
that all the others do, or if he does it, performs 
his duty in an unusual and less serviceable man- 
ner. This is the most uncomfortable aspect of 



i-x 



74 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

this view of the Unconscious, as the uncivilised, 
not to say violent and crazy, Titan that each and 
every one of us carries around all the time. Watch 
him carefully! He it is that breaks loose when 
savages " run amuck " and him we unchain when 
we melt his bonds with liquor! Him we satisfy 
when we do so many things that our conscious life 
in soberer moments disapproves of or finds il- 
logical, as we look back on our former acts and 
wonder how it was possible that we ever could 
have done this or that thing, made this or that 
blunder. 

On this side of our nature I do not, however, 
wish to leave the reader gazing. It is enough to 
lift for a brief moment the veil which time has 
drawn over the past that lives in the present. If 
psychoanalysis had been able to do no more than 
this, its results would not have justified the years 
that have been spent in its manifold researches. 
There is one compensation for all the repulsive- 
ness which a glance at the depths of the Uncon- 
scious reveals. As one writer puts it: "Where 
the brightest light is, there are the darkest shad- 
ows." Let us remember that we have the light! 
The light does not cast the shadows ; they are cast 
by the objects that we wanted to see when we 
made the light. The compensation for the terror 
which first strikes our hearts when we see in the 
past of our race the dark outlines, those forms 



THE CENSOR 75 

" that tare each other in their slime, " the ves- 
tigial remains of which are still active in the 
thoughts and actions of our daily life, is the in- 
dubitable fact that for the soul that realises these 
conditions there is in life nothing too terrible to 
be borne. This is the least of the compensations, 
being merely negative, but there are others far 
greater and more positive. 

To restate the results, so far, of our consider- 
ation of the manifestations of the Unconscious in 
our daily life : We find the Unconscious to be 
completely retentive of all past experiences, par- 
ticularly of the emotions, completely repressive 
of all except a meagre few which are necessities 
for our existence and for what happiness we may 
be able to get out of life, and we find that the 
repressed elements are possessed of a vigorous 
vitality, and that they are controlled or curbed to 
a certain extent by an inhibitory power that has 
been called the psychic censor. This represents 
in us the restraining force of society upon us, and 
acts as a sort of agency for society somewhat as a 
diplomatic agent represents a foreign country, 
but with the added qualification that this censor 
does not merely excise from the demands sent up 
from the forces below; but, because the demands 
are so strong and so insistent and so rudimentary, 
transforms the demands for life, love and action 
in such a way that they are unrecognisable. It is 



76 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

only when we recognise that the instinct to do cer- 
tain things — to chew gum, for instance, is merely 
a disguised demand on the part of the Uncon- 
scious that we keep constantly munching at some- 
thing, in the case of the gum (or sucking some- 
thing, such as a pipe or a cigar or a piece of 
candy) — it is only when we recognise what is at 
the bottom of these impulses that we see what 
their true value is, and in the cases just mentioned 
the regression of the desire to a level of mere 
nutritive function. We should be glad for this 
censor to abide with us and especially happy to 
have him as well developed as possible in other 
people, because he is in a certain sense what keeps 
others from making life intolerable to us. And 
there is a way in which we can help him both in 
ourselves and in others. 

But before I come to that point I shall have to 
call attention to the enormous power of the Un- 
conscious. If it is the accumulated desire in each 
one of us, of aeons of evolution, the present form, 
in each individual, of that vital force which has 
kept itself immortal through thousands of gener- 
ations of men behind us, and millions of genera- 
tions of animals behind them, it need not be any- 
thing but a source of power to us, power that we 
can draw on, if we rightly understand it, just as 
we turn on power from a steam pipe or an electric 
wire. It need not be destructive, indeed is not 



THE CENSOR 77 

destructive except in the most distracted souls, but 
on the contrary ought in each one of us, when we 
have learned to manage it rightly, to be as much 
and as completely at our command as is the power 
in an automobile. As in the automobile, there are a 
few simple things that we have to learn and the 
rest is furnished by the maker of the car, and we 
do ill to tamper with it. The experience of hav- 
ing a fifty-horsepower auto placed at one's com- 
mand (if it is to be driven by oneself) is a situa- 
tion into which there are many persons, both men 
and women,' who are very loth to enter. And sim- 
ilarly there are many persons who for various 
causes would not be willing to have the fifty-thou- 
sand-generation-power which resides in them de- 
veloped. There are various reasons for this, 
which will be discussed later. 

We are concerned now chiefly with the proposi- 
tion that the will to live, love and act, conditioned 
as it is by the power which has gone on living and 
loving and acting for countless generations, is the 
only source of all human strength. A number of 
religious sects have sprung up and have called it 
the manifestation of Deity or Deity itself. The 
only point in that connection concerning us here is 
that to all intents and purposes, and as far as 
human flesh is able to endure the strain, this power 
which is largely in the hands of the Unconscious in 
most men and women is illimitable. Illustrations 



78 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

of human endurance, perseverance, ambition and 
accomplishment are unnecessary to mention now, 
as they would but draw the attention away from 
the present path. But it is quite evident that the 
persons who have distinguished themselves in his- 
tory for their performances of various kinds have 
not all been people of extraordinary physical 
strength. They have, on the other hand, some- 
times been handicapped by physical afflictions, in 
spite of which they performed their stirring deeds. 
They have, however, all been people in whom the 
power to live, to love and to act was united upon 
one object at a time. The power which they had 
and exercised was not dissipated by conflicting ele- 
ments within themselves/ They devoted all their 
energies to a single aim for long periods, and were 
capable of long and sustained effort. This is pos- 
sible only if the Unconscious is, as it were, har- 
nessed to the same plough as the conscious life. 
The amount of work, physical or otherwise, that 
man, woman or child can do is known to be meas- 
ured by what has been called their interest. Now, 
when interest flags and the work is done in a half- 
hearted way, it means simply and solely that the 
Unconscious, which is in a certain sense infantile 
because it is archaic, childish because representing 
in the present the childhood of the race, begins to 
weary of the activity which it is being put through, 
and sends wily wireless messages from the depths, 



THE CENSOR 79 

fabricating all sorts of reasons — some, if not all 
of them, very plausible — for our ceasing the activ- 
ity in question and doing something else. This 
something else is almost always eating or drink- 
ing or taking some purely physical satisfaction of a 
low order when compared with the kind of activ- 
ity by which the world would most be benefited. 

This concentration of the powers of one indi- 
vidual unitedly upon one aim is a proof that the 
souls of some people are united; and the different 
degrees of unitedness in different individuals show 
that progress can be made in the line of uniting 
ourselves to ourselves. It should not be thought 
that differences in native endowment are sufficient 
to account for the enormous differences in ac- 
complishment, and a country like the United 
States amply demonstrates that different de- 
grees of accomplishment in social service are 
not limited in opportunity. The differences in the 
practical results of human endeavour are condi- 
tioned solely by the human endeavour itself, and 
that in turn by the ability of the individual to per- 
form his work without interruption or obstacles 
thrown in his way by his Unconscious. /The true 
alignment of the personality can be accomplished 
by the individual only by turning the tables, as it 
! were, on the Unconscious J If the Unconscious 
; is, as I have attempted to show, a power plant 
and now engaged in making a multitude of ginv 



80 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

cracks to be sold on sidewalks by peddlers, it must 
be converted into a factory for the specialised pro- 
duction of some one useful commodity. In human 
literalness, corresponding to this mechanical meta- 
phor, we are to give up as many as possible of the 
distractions, which by a study of the Unconscious 
we shall see in their true light as archaic, and 
therefore instances of arrested development, ar- 
rested as it were in the childhood of the race, and 
substitute for them actions that are more in line 
with the team work called for by the requirements 
of modern progressive society. This necessitates 
our getting the Unconscious to take a higher aim 
for a lower, almost to cheat it, so to speak, into 
believing that it is eating when it is working. 

F. Sublimation 

The real causes of our daily behaviour having 
been revealed to us by psychoanalysis, we are in 
duty bound to reckon with them. When their 
symbolisms are understood by consciousness, a 
definite line of action has to be pursued in order 
to array the unlimited power of those unconscious 
wishes on the side of modern progressive social 
action. This process of enlisting the Unconscious 
in the work that is available for social purposes is 
called Sublimation because it sublimes (an old 
word in alchemy) or sublimates the crude desires 






SUBLIMATION 81 

of the Unconscious. Just as the alchemists in the 
early days of science thought that they could trans- 
mute the baser metals into gold, so the philoso- 
phers have found that we can change the direction 
and object of the baser desires into higher ones 
having in them more gold — that is, more value — 
for the modern development of society. 

That the old Titan, Unconscious, can be coz- 
ened or cajoled into taking other substitutes for 
the nutritional aims that he is always growling for 
is seen when we reflect on the many amusements 
and distractions that humans are always seeking. 
Not one per cent, of them really know why they 
are playing golf or tennis or swimming or danc- 
ing. If they did, some of them would be surprised 
indeed. To give an example of the way " A sub- 
stitute shines brightly as a king Until a king be 
by," let me mention the extraordinary value placed 
by the lover upon the possession of his mistress' 
glove or handkerchief, or a rose that she has worn, 
which he cherishes up to the point of fetichism, 
and all to satisfy — and for a time, at any rate, it 
does satisfy — the old Titan within him, as a repre- 
sentative of the adored one, retaining a vividness 
and a magnetism for him which make him some- 
times the laughing-stock of those not in his excited 
condition. 

There is, then, a real satisfaction, conscious 
and unconscious, in the possession of the token 



82 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

above mentioned. I do not mean to imply for a 
moment that it will or should continue to be a sat- 
isfaction of the right kind, but it makes life endur- 
able for a while. 

Then there is the sublimation which is necessary 
for the lover who, through the death or unfaith- 
fulness of the inamorata, is obliged to give up 
all hope of ever completely possessing her. We 
know that it can be done. " Men have died, and 
worms have eaten them, but not for love." The 
intense desire, directed by chance toward one of 
the opposite sex, may still be utilised as an enor- 
mous power for the attainment of an end which 
eventually will give as great a spiritual satisfaction 
as would have been given by the attainment of the 
end first proposed. In other words, it has been 
proved over and over that humans can get inter- 
ested in anything, especially anything human, the 
only requisite being the same as that for the love 
of men for women and women for men; that is, 
a complete devotion to and absorption in the work 
that they are doing, to the utter forgetfulness of 
self. 

G. Introversion 

An ignorance of the real causes of our acts 
from hour to hour may result in our not being able 
to see our opportunities in the line of social co- 
operation. We may turn more and more away 



.-- 



INTROVERSION 83 

from relations with the outer world, and more and 
more become preoccupied with what we conceive 
as our own interests. We may seek our satisfac- 
tions from within or from without. 

By virtue of the principle of ambivalence, to be 
discussed in a later chapter, the Unconscious is 
susceptible of development in these two opposite 
directions. It may develop in such a way as to 
appear to be essentially selfish, or, to use a homely 
expression, ingrowing. It may frequently tend to 
turn in upon itself, to feed upon itself and to con- 
sume itself. At the same time, however, we are 
to remember that, as a source of almost unlimited 
power, it still has the ability, if not obstructed by 
one or another factor of the environment, of de- 
veloping outward and effecting the greater part of 
its work upon the outer world. The cause of the 
introversion, as it is called, or the tendency to turn 
in upon itself, is the fact that for a very important 
period of our lives — that is, our infancy — we 
absorb more influences from both outer and inner 
world than at any other time. In this most im- 
pressionable time of our lives, when we learn more 
than we do at any other time, we are almost unable 
to avoid getting the greater, by far the greater, 
part of our satisfactions from our own persons. 
The nursing infant hardly distinguishes any w T orld 
outside of itself; and that, as we know, is composed 
largely of absorbing liquid nourishment, playing 



84 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

with its toes and other parts of its body, and filling 
the air with its own inarticulate but vociferous pro- 
testations. Satisfaction from effecting changes 
upon external reality, silently and with its hands, 
it, of course, knows nothing about. And yet, when 
we look at the ordinary actions of many of our 
acquaintances of maturer years, how much better 
do they do than the infant? The nourishment is 
changed, with the advent of teeth, from entirely 
liquid to partly solid, the playing with its toes goes 
on, figuratively, as a great part of human activity 
is really not much more useful than that for the ad- 
vancement, material and spiritual, of society; and 
as for the filling of the air with inarticulate but vo- 
ciferous protestations, what is the major portion 
of ordinary adult (so-called) conversation, small 
talk, but a voicing of one's own opinions, without 
any more regard than the infant as to whether 
those opinions are interesting to, not to say effect 
any change in, the world of reality outside of 
them? 

Most conversation, when between two persons, 
consists in one person talking to himself in the 
hearing of the other person and vice versa. When 
among three or more persons it is the same thing, 
only multiplied. A voices his own opinions or 
gives utterance to a train of thought that gen- 
erally has no reference to B, and if B gets a 
chance, which he may when A's verification is 



PLEASURE-PAIN VS. REALITY 85 

exhausted, he goes ahead and does the same thing. 
Rarely does either of them take any interest in 
the shade of difference of personality between him- 
self and the other. Only those who are intuitively 
able to take some small steps in the study of the 
Unconscious succeed in really conversing, which, 
according to derivation, should mean a convert- 
ing of the thoughts of the one into a form compre- 
hensible to the other and vice versa. But rarely 
are the one person's thoughts entertained by the 
other for any purpose whatever except pure nega- 
tion, contradiction being the easiest treatment of 
any presented theme, consisting, as it does, of a 
merely parrot-like repetition of ideas, but with the 
parrot-like or inhuman quality of the negative. 
Elsewhere, page 60, I refer to the essential iden- 
tity of any idea and its negative. It may, indeed, 
be said that an idea has no negative, except pos- 
sibly that the negative of an idea is but a mental 
blank, nothing at all. 

H. Pleasure-Pain versus Reality 

Considerable illumination comes to us if we 
regard the causes of our individual actions as de- 
termined on the one hand by a wish for or a disin- 
clination from the pleasure or pain connected with 
such actions, or, on the other hand, by a wish to 
produce an effect on the outside world by these 
actions. 



86 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

In these considerations of reality and the atti- 
tude toward reality which is required by the fully 
developed adult psyche, it is necessary to bear in 
mind that the natural tendency of the psyche up 
to the time of real adulthood is to regard the value 
of all things and experiences in accordance with 
the degree of pleasure or pain which they produce 
in the psyche, and as pleasure and pain are pro- 
duced only in the psyche, or in other words are 
absolutely subjective and are not qualities inher- 
ent in real things belonging to the outer world, 
we have here a standard by which to test all ex- 
periences. This is called the principle of pleasure-" 
pain versus reality. If an effort is made which has 
for its aim the production of pleasure alone or the 
avoidance of pain only, it is instigated merely from 
the archaic Unconscious level. If it has an ele- 
ment in it of doing better work by means of doing 
it under pleasurable rather than painful circum- 
stances, it is to be approved only from the point of 
view of the work actually done and is so far re- 
moved from simple infantility. If the work is 
such that it is completed irrespective of the pleas- 
ure or pain it may entail, but only with a view to 
its productiveness from the social standpoint, 
then it is completely removed from infantility 
and is directed according to the principle of 
reality. 

The mark of the completely socialised human 



PLEASURE-PAIN VS. REALITY 87 

adult is a separation from self, or from the effort- 
less consuming of self, and an effective or outwork- 
ing activity upon things recognised as not self, 
viz., the world of reality. The world of reality 
consists of those things which we cannot always 
control, but with which we are continually experi- 
menting, to see if we can control them. If we can 
control them, we expand our Self by the measure 
of everything over which we exercise control. If 
we build a house or organise a club, or cover a 
window with mosquito netting or even hammer in 
a single tack where it ought to be, and was not, 
we are by so much expanding our Self. The ex- 
pending of effort is the expanding of Ego. If, 
on the other hand, we sit down and imagine what 
we should like to do, and know at the same time 
that we never shall do it, we are in the condition of 
the infant playing with itself. It has no control 
over the world ; it gets all its joy out of itself. But 
the individual who recognises the difference be- 
tween himself and the outer world (and very few 
realise the import of that difference), and recog- 
nises that his own growth and expansion depend 
on his manipulation, not of himself, but of that 
outside world, will, with an ever increasing inter- 
est, try and prove and try again in an effort to see 
how much of his environment he can shape to his 
ideas. For those of us who are in the powerful 
grip of the Unconscious the difference between 



88 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

ourselves and the outside world of reality is diffi- 
cult or impossible to realise, for the reason that It 
constantly plays upon us a trick which only a 
few have been able to beat It at. jThis trick con- 
sists in causing us, by virtue of the strong colour of 
Self that we are invested with, to think that what 
we see is what we want to see./ This propensity 
is called by It the genial quality of seeing the 
best in things, of making the best out of things — 
a phrase that, like reality in the hands of the Un- 
conscious, is subject to much twisting. If things 
go dead wrong, of course, as the motto says, we 
ought to smile; but it means a lot more. Some 
people take it to mean that we should be satis- 
fied with what has been allotted to us by Fate, 
accept without a struggle what she has given us 
and smile, probably at her, to see if we cannot in- 
duce her to give more. Other people take it to 
mean that we should spare them the pain which 
our outcry might occasion them. 

I. Regression 

The metaphor of Fate, just now used with the 
feminine pronoun, suggests a corollary of the in- 
fantility of the Unconscious. I have mentioned 
its childish or archaic character, childish because it 
seeks its satisfactions out of (from) itself as an in- 
fant does, being powerless to move the external 



REGRESSION 89 

world or any part of it, and archaic because it has 
been so and done so for many hundreds of thou- 
sands of years. This characteristic of the Uncon- 
scious which is shown in its tendency to go 
backward to stages of development which were the 
highest point reached ages ago in the evolution 
of the human mind is called Regression. Re- 
gression is toward an infantile state, and the im- 
plication inherent in this term is its relative term, 
mother. 

The Unconscious behaves as if it wanted to be 
a child and to return to, and get things out of 
(from), its mother. Thus the man submits to 
Fate or to Fortune, as a child submits to its 
mother, and he looks to Fortune for favours as 
the infant looks to its mother for sustenance. 
This is the attitude of all gamblers, of spec- 
ulators of all kinds, and other people who, 
like Mr. Micawber, are looking for things 
to " turn up." This attitude to the world, 
similar to the attitude of the child toward its 
mother, is a widespread characteristic of men and 
women. In other words, the infantile Uncon- 
scious, constituting by far the greater part of our 
total self, and controlling by far the greater part 
of our actions, makes us behave in a multitude of 
relations with the world not even like grown-up 
children, but like children not grown up, and to 
act toward the world as a child does toward itc 



9 o MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

mother, receiving favours with great expectations 
and small thanks, and attempting to reject rebuffs 
with loud wailings more like the vociferated prot- 
estations previously mentioned. All this the 
Unconscious makes us do without realising it our- 
selves. Of the figure we are cutting we are our- 
selves unconscious. And we are unconscious of 
it for the same reason that the clown in Hamlet 
gave for Hamlet's madness not being seen in him 
in England: " There they are all as mad as he." 

J. Universality of Manifestation 

The physical sciences teach us that no motion 
of any material body is without a cause, that the 
effect is always measurably equal to the cause, that 
no atom is ever destroyed and that no energy is 
ever lost. Analytical psychology is differentiated 
from other mental science in making the same 
statement about psychical phenomena, namely, that 
all motions of our bodies are invariably the effects 
of physical causes within or without our bodies, 
that these causes within our bodies are conditions 
either physical or mental, and furthermore that all 
mental manifestations whatever are quite as much 
subject to the law of causation as are the purely 
physical phenomena. The billiard ball was set in 
motion by my cue, the cue by my arm, my arm by 
my mind. All, including the mental action of aim- 



UNIVERSALITY 9I 

ing at the other ball and willing the motion of my 
arm, are equally determined by the same law of 
causation. Not only that, but every association 
of ideas that could possibly occur to me is the in- 
evitable result of causes that have been operative 
always. It needs but a slight exercise of the im- 
agination to conceive that if a person were able to 
trace back the causes of every act of our life, he 
could tell exactly why we had done any action. 
This would fill with meaning every expression of 
countenance of every face he saw, and enable him 
to know by anyone's actions exactly what he was 
thinking. The slightest movement of a finger 
would be to him indicative of the whole character, 
for it is evident that having a certain mental or 
moral character a man cannot help revealing it by 
every motion of his body. Freud says that mortals 
can hide no secret, and that whoever is silent with 
the lips tattles with the finger tips, betrayal oozing 
out of every pore. 

Thus have we forever continued to express our 
intimate thoughts in everything we do, and have 
as continually refrained from reading each other's 
natures thus exposed. And the strangeness, the 
ridiculousness of the whole proceeding still con- 
tinues. All but the smallest fraction of us abso- 
lutely unconscious (that is, unknown to ourselves) , 
and yet to anyone else perfectly legible in every- 
thing we do — legible but forever unread, un- 



92 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

thought about and not acted on ! But now at last 
in the analytic form of psychology we have not 
only the gift to " see oursels as ithers see us/' 
but to see ourselves as no one of us has ever before 
seen another. 

If we were suddenly given an insight into the 
motives governing the actions of the people 
around us, it would at once give us a clear under- 
standing of what their words really meant. If, on 
the other hand, some device could be invented 
which would translate every utterance of our 
fellows into truth, regardless of what degree of 
prevarication was intended, we should have but 
a perfected variety of the present analytic psy- 
chology. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE UNCONSCIOUS (DYNAMIC) 

The previous chapter has been largely devoted to 
a description of certain phases of the Unconscious. 
We have now to examine some of its workings as 
dynamic, and to emphasise the continual trickery 
which it practises upon us, as well as the way in 
which it sometimes helps us to do our work better, 
as we learn more and more to sublimate the con- 
tinuous and never completely satisfied craving. 
And first of all we should realise that the craving 
changes the appearance of reality. 

A. Craving or Reality? 

We can conceive of a person with an imagina- 
tion so strong as to change the greater part of 
external reality from what it is to what he im- 
agines it is. A child playing with a few sticks and 
stones makes of them, in his imagination, boats 
and docks or people and houses. Similarly the 
insane person thinks one or another of his com- 
panions to be his mother, his wife, his enemy or 
anyone else. The insane are children, and chil- 

93 



94 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

dren are expected to be at least a little foolish. 
The difference is only in what society has a right 
to expect of them. When we are more civilised I 
think that perhaps more will be expected of chil- 
dren in the way of productive work than is now 
except in agricultural districts. In schools, even, 
they are sometimes required to make things that 
really add to the wealth of the nation in a small 
way. 

Like the child playing with sticks and stones 
and water, and taking out of himself the difference 
between the reality and his desires, a great many 
adults are accomplishing a little and are getting 
their satisfaction out of their own imagining that 
their accomplishments are greater than they really 
are. It is easier to imagine that a piece of work 
is satisfactory to ourselves and to other people 
than it is to do it again and again until we have i 
proved by every means in our power that we could 
not do it better. Since childhood we have prac- 
tised ourselves, not in performance, but in pulling 
the wool over our own desires. The contrast be- 
tween the world of our wishes and the world of 
reality is ever before our eyes. Where we do not 
see it is just where we have accustomed ourselves 
to be satisfied with the less, rather than with the 
greater accomplishment. The infantility of our 
present civilisation, much as it may have invented 
and built and produced, constantly forms a bar- 



CRAVING OR REALITY? 95 

rier against further progress. If we devote our 
days and our nights to toil, our acquaintances call 
us unsocial, and unsocial we are, to be sure, in a 
certain narrow sense. If sociability is demanded 
of us, consisting in a playing of games, and eating 
of feasts, and in driving of motor-cars and boast- 
ing how fast and how far we have driven them, 
then sociability is no virtue. Here again our Un- 
conscious is deceiving us. The contrast between 
our wishes and our reality is again obscured in the 
same way as it is in the case of the children with 
their sticks and stones. We do not see the dis- 
crepancy between what we have and what we wish. 
With a childish complacency we take what we have 
for what we desire, because our desires are so 
strong that they would make it seem that we simply 
could not stand disappointment, and the only way 
not to be disappointed in the majority of the sit- 
uations in which we find ourselves is to wrench 
the truth to fit our desires. Most of us actually 
accomplish this terrific twist of the lenses through 
which we see life, and fancy that we cause a thing 
to be so merely by believing it to be so. This is on 
the supposition of the intolerability of the idea of 
being disappointed in any of our desires, a sup- 
position that gains support from all the intimate 
study of the human soul made in more recent 
times. And the significant point about the intol- 
erability of an idea is the fact that this quality of it 



96 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

is exactly what causes the idea to be repressed and 
to be forced to maintain an existence of its own 
apart from our conscious lives, and yet, as will 
be shown later, to be closely connected with our 
conscious lives and to appear in them daily, hourly, 
but in forms that we do not recognise and can 
recognise only with the aid of psychoanalysis. If 
only we were all strong enough to stand any dis- 
appointment, any rebuff, we never should have any 
troubles either physical or mental. There's the 
rub ! The truth is that we are all stronger, men- 
tally and physically, than we think we are, and 
here again our Unconscious is deceiving us.* 
We have all heard that it is not overwork 
that kills, but worry. But worry is only the fear 
that we are going to break down. " Cowards 
die many times before their deaths. The valiant 
only taste of death but once." Children do not so 
soon get tired of play, because in play they and 
their Unconscious are united, there are no com- 
plexes or conflicts (of the mental variety), and so 
no obstructions in their activities. They " get 
tired " when it comes to some lessons, and for the 
reason that in them they are not united with them- 
selves. 

The trick above referred to, that the Uncon- 
scious plays upon us all more or less, is that of 

*"The Unconscious has an extremely subtle skill in shaping 
humans according to its desires." — Pfister, /. c, p. 98. 



CRAVING OR REALITY? 97 

making us think that our desires are being realised, 
when they are only partly realised or not at all. It 
is somewhat as if one wished that all the earth 
were blue like the sky, and put on a pair of blue 
glasses in order to change it into blue. To make 
this concept more vivid I need only refer to a 
form of insanity in which the afflicted person im- 
agines that he is Napoleon or Jehovah, or to any 
other form of megalomania, and to repeat what 
I have said on page 73, about the line of demar- 
kation between sanity and insanity. To the extent 
that we are all controlled by the Unconscious, we 
are all of us megalo- or any other kind of maniacs 
in greater or less degree, for the simple and sole 
reason that we allow our desires to colour our per- 
ceptions. It has long been recognised by psychol- 
ogists that our former sensations affected our later 
perceptions, but the important part played by our 
wishes was almost entirely overlooked. We are 
what we are because of our wishes. Had our 
wish to be other than we are been a stronger one 
we should have been other. A Rip Van Winkle is 
a drink-wrecked wretch because he has gratified 
the imbibing wish from his infancy, and really pre- 
ferred, like Omar Khayyam, to take the cash and 
let the credit go. The same may be asserted 
of all men, successful and unsuccessful alike. 
They wish to be what they are, the unsuccessful 
at the same time wishing to bemoan their fate with 



98 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

vociferous protestations. They are not obliged 
to. But they get positive pleasure at the infant- 
wailing level, a pleasure quite analogous to the 
boasting of the successful man. 



B. Where Do Thoughts Come From? 

Nowhere do we realise more keenly that the 
real motives of our everyday acts are hidden from 
us than in the inquiry as to the origin of the im- 
pulse to do any given thing. Even in the matter 
of sense perception we frequently notice after- 
ward that we have not seen what was before our 
eyes, and have seen what was not there. A simple 
and concrete example of this is the infrequency of 
our seeing misprints. An inverted letter in a word 
is seldom noticed, an omitted letter is supplied by 
the mind, a superfluous letter is ignored. We see 
only what is in our minds, was the old form of 
expression, but a newer one and a better would be 
to say that we see, hear and feel only what is in 
our hearts, that is, in our desires. A most con- 
vincing method of showing that is to point out 
that the mere occurrence of an idea to a person 
is a proof that that idea and no other was the idea 
wished for by the Unconscious. For instance, I 
am handed a letter by the postman, and see on it 
the handwriting of someone who owes me some 
money. My first thought is that he may be send- 



WHENCE COME THOUGHTS? 99 

ing me a check to cover his indebtedness. I may 
express that thought in the cynical form of there 
being no such luck as that this fellow should pay 
his debts so soon. But be advised that no wish is 
itself negative in its matter. It may be couched in 
a negative form, suggested by the desire of the 
Titan to be powerful in the way of deep knowl- 
edge of the world. But the wish for the money is 
there in its positive shape, just the same, whether 
it is expressed affirmatively or negatively. I tear 
open the envelope and I read that the wretch is 
going to be married to a girl whom I know quite 
well and think very highly of. There was no 
chance that this idea should ever have come into 
my mind ! 

It is almost impossible to tell, of any experience, 
how much and what is contributed to the total im- 
pression by the outside world and what by the in- 
ner world of thought. In a street accident where 
a horse knocks down and runs over a man, one 
observer is horrified to see the horse step right on 
the man's chest and thinks that the weight that a 
horse puts on his right forefoot is enough to crush 
the man's chest and perhaps kill him instantly. 
It appears that a large proportion of the horror 
of that occasion was contributed by the horrified 
observer, as the man in question to the surprise of 
the onlooker, not to say to his disappointment, 
immediately jumped up and walked off. The wit- 



ioo MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

ness never knew whether the horse had really 
stepped on the man or not. The witness was quite 
sure, however, of his own unpleasant sensations. 
Now, must it be said that the witness desired to 
see injury done to the man? If what I have said 
about our seeing what is in our hearts is true we 
must say that. Not that the witness had any 
grudge against the man, either, for he was a total 
stranger. But why in a city does a crowd imme- 
diately collect around any accident? Do all the 
people that run to see what is at the centre of a 
street crowd think that they can be of service? 
We are obliged to acknowledge that there is a 
desire for excitement in all of us, which is satis- 
fied by the sight of any unusual occurrence, even 
if it be a disaster. Psychoanalysis, as will be 
shown later, believes that all excitement is sexual 
in its nature, fundamentally. 

Another instance. Suppose that Willie wants 
to go fishing down the bay in a rowboat with a 
couple of other boys about his age. What is 
Mother's first idea? "Oh, I'm afraid that he 
might get drowned ! " What put that idea into 
her head? The Unconscious. What would It 
lose if Willie got drowned? Nothing; It would 
go on wishing for more excitement; It would reap 
the intense feelings of a nine-days' talk. It sent 
up that idea into Mother's head from the depths 
where It has been squirming for aeons. But the 



WHENCE COME THOUGHTS? 101 

thought was most natural. Boys do get into such 
trouble. One reads of it in the papers every day. 
Yes, to be sure, madam, but the proportion of 
boys that are drowned is very small indeed com- 
pared with the number who go fishing. There is 
also another practical point of view in this con- 
nection. Everything that Willie does apart from 
his mother makes him independent of her, and 
brings nearer a separation which can do only good 
to him, but which most mothers think is undesir- 
able for themselves. The plain fact, which the 
mother's Unconscious blinds her to, is that her 
own importance, her own size in Willie's world, 
so to speak, is greatly enlarged by any mishap 
that can occur to him. If he only gets a fish- 
hook in his foot, he and she both go backwards, 
maybe several years, to the time when he was 
wholly dependent on her for life and sustenance, 
and they both regress, as the expression is, 
to the mother-infant condition, for the time 
being. Such temporary regressions are common 
enough in everyone's life. But the point is that 
mothers ought not to worry. Perhaps they would 
worry less if they knew that all worry is fear and 
that all fear is desire, even though it be expressed 
in a negative form. But we must return to the 
tricks of the Unconscious, and in particular to the 
extremely common trick it has of supplying us with 
our ideas, especially fears, or other apprehensions. 



102 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

I once knew a man who was left a fortune by 
an uncle. It was left in trust, the income of it to 
be used by the widow until her death. At that 
time her expectation of life was twelve years, but 
the wish for the money made the expectant inheri- 
tor turn, every morning from that time on for sev- 
eral years, to the column of the newspaper that 
contained the death notices, and look for the 
name of his uncle's widow. I am wondering how 
many hours of his life he has wasted in that ig- 
noble search. He might have done quite a bit for 
science in that time, or earned some of the money 
that he is still waiting for. But he, like so many 
others, was at those times, as well as at most other 
times, in the grip of his Unconscious, which di- 
verted him, as it daily diverts the majority of us, 
from the path of greatest ultimate satisfaction to 
us to a regressive path on which we amble, led on 
placidly by blind desire, without the least thought 
of whether it is the best or the worst desire. 

All these are tricks of the Unconscious to lull 
us backward to the condition of the prenatal sleep. 
It seems that only a few of us have the natural 
faculty of rousing ourselves to continuous useful 
activity without inspiration or instigation from 
outside. But it is at least interesting to know that 
if the Unconscious is reached and affected from 
without, the awakening may take place. 

In Chapter X we shall mention some of the 



WHENCE COME THOUGHTS? 103 

manifestations of the Unconscious in everyday life, 
but here, while on the topic of the continual trick- 
ery of the Unconscious by which it influences our 
actions, I must say one word more about how hard 
it is to detect oneself in time in the very act of re- 
laxing control over the Unconscious. As we pro- 
ceed with our daily occupations, our attention is 
for the moment deflected from the thing we hap- 
pen to be doing toward something else not in the 
same line of thought and not leading to the same 
goal. Is this a social or an asocial deflection 
of attention? That depends almost always on 
whether the source of the interruption is external 
or internal. If we are working at some task and 
a caller comes in, or some question has to be de- 
cided, which has come up unexpectedly at that 
time, it is of course possible that we should be act- 
ing in an asocial manner if we went on with our 
work, and did not first respond to the call, but if 
on the other hand a thought occurred to us and 
we did not make a memorandum of it as briefly as 
possible and immediately go on with our work, we 
should not be acting in a way that would lead to 
the best results from the point of view of the social 
organisation, which requires us to make the best 
possible use of every minute of our time. The 
head of a big business, and the heads of many 
departments of business more or less great, care- 
fully shield themselves, by means of secretaries, 



io 4 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

telephone operators and pages, from anything that 
will unnecessarily divert their attention from the 
work in hand. So should our craving be kept 
shielded from deflection, for in the deflection of 
the organic craving it is not the whole that is 
changed but only a small part of it. If the di- 
rection of the entire craving were changed, we 
should still have a united psyche, but with its cur- 
rent all flowing in a direction which might not be 
the best one for the co-workers in the evolution of 
society. For instance, it probably takes all of the 
combined craving of an individual psyche to coun- 
teract the restrictive suggestions of society to so 
great an extent as to allow the man to commit a 
murder of the first degree. This psyche, however, 
has for the time being had its craving all united 
toward one goal. 

To take an illustration less sensational : A man 
was going to pay a bill at a store next door to a 
drug store. As he was about to pass the drug 
store a large automobile glided up to it and a 
beautiful young woman stepped out and walked 
into the drug store. It is not hard to conceive of 
what the man was thinking when, in a moment of 
forgetfulness, he went into the drug store and 
offered to the cashier his check in payment of the 
bill that he had incurred at the next store (which 
sold paints and oils) . His Unconscious, following 
the archaic trends of its infantile constitution, 



WHENCE COME THOUGHTS? 105 

craved to look at the beauty who had come out of 
the automobile, and so far overcame the conscious 
purpose of the man that it made him follow the 
young woman, but without the slightest show of 
impoliteness. For a brief time it simply abolished 
all thought of the errand which he was on and de- 
flected his actual path from one store and made 
him go into another. He did not regain his full 
consciousness until he stood before the cashier and 
realised that it was not there that he owed the 
money. Thus does the Unconscious take hold and 
steer us sometimes into situations that we find 
somewhat embarrassing. This incident shows us 
the Unconscious in complete control of a man's 
actions for a brief time and the rapid awakening, 
as it might be called, to his conscious purpose. 

How the Unconscious controls the nature of the 
ideas that seem to occur to us when we suddenly 
and without apparent reason merely happen to 
think of something, may be illustrated by the fol- 
lowing examples. It is a familiar experience to 
all of us to find ourselves thinking of something, 
to wonder how we happened to be thinking of that 
particular thing, and then to be able to trace back 
the associations of ideas through several steps un- 
til we are satisfied that we have found the orig- 
inal thought that started the whole train of ideas, 
the noteworthy feature of which strikes us as 
being the remoteness of the last idea from the first. 



io6 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

We rarely or never try to think where the orig- 
inal idea came from. We always find, however, if 
we take the trouble to devote some thought to the 
matter, that the original idea is the expression of 
a desire on our part. In other words, the first 
idea, apparently not associated with anything at all 
that we may have been thinking of at the time, has 
been supplied by the Unconscious. It is a remark- 
able fact, too, that not only the first idea in the 
series, but also all the others, which seem so nat- 
urally associated with each other, have been sup- 
plied in the same way. When we think right 
along naturally without any restraint, or repres- 
sion, as we now call it, and the ideas flow in easily 
without any obstructions, we may safely say that 
the smoother the flow of thoughts the more sub- 
ject they are to the dictation of the Unconscious. 
Every idea is associated according to Its logic, 
with the wishes which It is formulating for Itself 
at the time. We may think we can control our 
thought, but it is quite manifest that if two people 
start with, for instance, the thought " hotel " the 
next thought may be " dance " for one of them 
and " hops " for the other, and the next may take 
them still farther apart, as from " dance " the lady 
might get " Fred," while from " hops " the gentle- 
man might next turn his thought (or his Uncon* 
scious might, for him) to beer. At any rate, the 
experience is common enough and it shows with- 



RESISTANCES 107 

out doubt that our ideas, apparently flowing as 
they will, and quite accidentally, are yet subject 
to the control of the Unconscious, and its selective 
action is plainly shown in cases like this one. 

In contrast to the free flowing of ideas as in the 
examples cited, we sometimes experience a stop- 
page in our flow of thoughts, the most familiar ex- 
ample of which is from embarrassment of one kind 
or another, as, for instance, when an inexperienced 
speaker is forced by circumstances to address an 
assembly, or even when an experienced speaker 
suddenly comes upon some part of his topic on 
which he is less prepared. We hear him hesitate 
for the right word, can see before our eyes, in fact, 
his Unconscious struggling with him and him with 
It until a compromise is reached. Sometimes the 
compromise is quite comical, too, as when the min- 
ister said he had in his heart a " half warmed 
fish," meaning to say a " half formed wish." This 
compromise is, however, a more mechanical type 
which will be discussed later when we come to 
speak of slips of the tongue and of the pen. 

C. Resistances 

These stoppages perceived by us all, in our- 
selves as well as in others, are concrete examples 
of the repression mentioned in the first part of this 
chapter. What we should have liked to say or do 
in the situation mentioned was for that time, at 



108 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

any rate, completely repressed. The Unconscious 
does not wish to utter the word or do the thing 
that would have been, according to our later view, 
most appropriate, because the word or thing is 
connected in the past with some unpleasant occur- 
rence which It does not wish to have brought into 
consciousness. This resistance or " balking " of 
thought, as we might call it, has been used in what 
is called the " association test " on criminals to 
make them unwittingly give evidence against 
themselves. If, for instance, a man suspected of 
murder is told to say what thought comes to him 
when " eating " is mentioned, and a hundred or so 
other commonplaces, among which is inserted 
some word such as " knife " or " pistol " or 
" poison," and the time he takes in replying to 
each of these suggestions is carefully recorded to 
the fifth of a second, there is hardly a criminal so 
brazen and so self-confident who will not hesitate 
for at least a fifth of a second when he hears a 
word associated with his crime. So that if a num- 
ber of hundred-word tests be administered to the 
same man, on different occasions, he will inevitably 
let out something at least that may be used as a 
clue to discover the circumstances of the crime. 
His Unconscious, not being in his power but he in 
Its power, he cannot avoid giving expression to It. 
This illustrates another characteristic of the 
Unconscious which is akin to its childishness, — 



RESISTANCES 109 

namely, its artlessness. Being untrained and uned- 
ucated through the centuries, it is always blurting 
out everything in a language not read except in 
psychological laboratory, criminal investigation 
and insane asylum, whereas it would add mate- 
rially to the understanding of men concerning their 
fellow-men and make us all more charitable to- 
ward each other if we all recognised what an 
enormous part in our lives this Unconscious plays, 
and that the persons who appear to be trying to 
injure us are not so much our enemies as their 
own. They are their own enemies in just the same 
way that each of us is his own enemy because we 
have not learned to master our Unconscious and 
make it serve society, which would be the best way 
for us to serve ourselves. Its artlessness is of a 
piece with ignorance of all kinds which we try in 
civilised countries to abolish in conscious ways by 
means of the different forms of what we call 
" education." It might be well to say here, how- 
ever, that " education " has as yet taken little 
account of the Unconscious, and that most if not 
all of the faults of the present system of instruc- 
tion in schools and colleges are attributable to that 
lack of wisdom. For " Know thyself ! " we cannot 
each and every one do, until we know more of 
ourselves than is comprised in that small percent- 
age of our nature which has been termed above the 
" fore-conscious." 



no MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

D. Conflicts 

The resistances, seen in the very act of thinking, 
indicate that a conflict has taken place between one 
tendency in the psyche, usually in the Unconscious, 
and another tendency which is generally the cen- 
sor. These conflicts, as revealed so constantly by 
the resistances, cause a continual irregularity in the 
running of the mental machine. They are thus 
manifested not merely in the mental blank which 
occurs to the person under psychoanalytic inves- 
tigation, who says that he cannot think of anything 
at all. They are shown not merely in the retard- 
ations of ideas in the association tests. They are 
in evidence hourly in the lives of most people, in 
actions which seem to be interrupted by external 
circumstances, but really are not. If I begin to 
write a letter to a person and come to a point when 
I cannot think of anything to say, I recognise at 
once the result of some unconscious conflict. If, 
during the writing of the letter, I happen to think 
of something that I had intended to do but had 
forgotten, I see an indication of another conflict. 
If I finish, seal and stamp the letter, put on my hat 
and go out, leaving the letter on the desk, and so 
do not post it, still another conflict is shown. All 
these take place below the level of consciousness, 
and only the net result is manifest. There has 
been a battle of ideas, and only the victor emerges. 



CONFLICTS ii r 

Why I could not go on with the letter, why I for- 
got the other action whose place the letter-writing 
takes, why I forgot to post the letter, can be known 
only after an analysis of the actions. 

In short, much of the lack of consecutiveness 
of our daily actions is the result of the appar- 
ently fortuitous, though really determined, nature 
of the ideas which occur to us and motivate our 
acts. We think of things we should like to do, and 
which would be very advantageous for us, and 
then distractions intervene and prevent us from 
striving toward those ideals. The point is that, 
except for the conflicts which have taken place, and 
of which we have been totally unconscious, we 
should not have become aware of those distrac- 
tions. A person thoroughly absorbed in his work 
will not hear or see what otherwise would distract 
him. Many a man has been thrown off the track 
he was travelling on in his day's work by the oc- 
currence of some essentially trivial thing, noticed 
by him only because of the conflict between that 
thing and his ideal, a conflict that had taken 
place in the Unconscious, and the winner in which 
had therefore the power to make the essentially 
trivial occurrence strong enough to enter his con- 
sciousness and attract his attention. 

Broadly speaking, we may say that the con- 
flict may be external or internal. The external is 
between the psyche and the world without. In 



ii2 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

this, if the psyche is united with itself, the satisfac- 
tion comes from the action of struggling itself, as 
when we, forgetting ourselves, effect what change 
we can upon our external environment. The inter- 
nal conflict is between the tendency to look for 
pleasure or for absence of pain as a result of the 
struggle. The struggle is then practically in the 
emotions, — that is, in our very selves, — and is not 
concerned with the world of external reality. 

Most of us know we are not doing our best 
every moment of every day, and now we know that 
the cause of it is the conflicts that have taken 
place without our knowledge. It is interesting, 
therefore, to learn of the antagonistic forces that 
struggle with each other in the Unconscious, and to 
inquire what gives them their power to carry on 
those contests. The resistances and the conflicts 
are due to the presence in the Unconscious of the 
different complexes. In the chapter on Therapy 
the share of these complexes in the production of 
morbid symptoms is further discussed. 

E. Complexes 

Complex is the name given by psychoanalysis to 
an idea or a group of ideas with which is associ- 
ated a tone of unpleasant feeling which keeps or 
tends to keep the complex out of consciousness. 
We all have complexes. The difference between 



COMPLEXES 113 

the complex and the ordinary forgotten occur- 
rence is that the latter has no feeling tone con- 
nected with it when it occurs and therefore does 
not have the energy, so to speak, to form a con- 
nection with other registered experiences, or life 
to go on developing by the assimilation of other 
experiences. Thus every experience which arouses 
at the same time a pleasant emotion is welcomed 
again and again into consciousness. We like to 
recall what has pleased us.* On the other hand, 
we know that we do not try to recall un- 
pleasant events. That a recent unpleasant event 
tends for a time to keep recurring to our minds 
is an example of what might be called an emo- 
tional after-image, and gives us the opportunity of 
working off the unpleasant event spiritually by con- 
sciously arranging it in our minds and finally dis- 
posing of it. It is only the unpleasant events 
which, crowded out of consciousness by our fear to 
face them as adult humans should, carry with them 
into the Unconscious the emotions which are the 
life of ideas and allow that life, like the sickly 
growth of pale plants in a cellar, to develop un- 
cared for by the consciousness. It is natural that 
we should remember the pleasant and forget the 
painful. But the pleasant occurrences, being fre- 

* Exceptionally, also, -we like to brood over our wrongs, if 
we are so constituted, — a trait which is mentioned under the 
head of Masochism in Chapter VII. 



ii 4 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

quently evoked and talked over with our friends, 
are brought into alignment with our daily con- 
scious lives. They give us strength for our pres- 
ent, and inspiration for our future, tasks. They 
do not become associated in a lump, in some 
corner of our minds, but are connected with all our 
waking experiences. A bit of travel is something 
that we can share with all our friends, telling them 
things they want to know. A pleasant adventure 
makes us friends with everybody. How much 
more sociable are strangers when on a holiday 
in the mountains or at the seashore ! The travel 
or adventure is unfolded or explicated, so to 
speak, and acquires relations with all of our men- 
tal life and so does not become coagulated or 
tangled up in one bunch. 

A complex, on the other hand, being repressed 
into the Unconscious on account of the painful 
feeling connected with it, at once begins in the Un- 
conscious to associate with itself a number of other 
ideas, all of which take on the unpleasant quality. 
These ideas, therefore, are prevented by this ac- 
quired unpleasantness from coming into conscious- 
ness. The person in whose mind these complexes 
are forming will not, without an effort, be able to 
remember these ideas when he wants them. The 
complexes will detach from the fore-conscious, 
where are stored the ideas which are subject to 
voluntary recall, one person's name, another per- 



COMPLEXES 115 

son's address, another's occupation, and drag them 
down toward the Unconscious, where they will 
nevermore be subject to his will. It is thus seen 
that, when looked at from the under side, — as it 
were, from the point of view of the Unconscious, — 
there must be complexes forming down there from 
the time of our earliest infancy. The complexes 
continue to develop and attach more and more 
ideas to themselves until finally our minds, even 
those of us who are completely normal, are made 
up of an overwhelming majority of forgotten or 
repressed matter, all of it available for the pur- 
pose of feeding the complexes, and none of it of 
any use to ourselves. Only the fullest human lives 
can prevent this formation of a sodden mass of 
complexes in the Unconscious of every one of us. 
The experiences of a thoroughly unsuccessful and 
disappointed life keep on making for oblivion, 
drawing one event after another back into the 
unconscious part of our psyche. The most active 
and successful men and women therefore will, 
other things being equal, have the fullest mem- 
ories, will be able to converse most entertainingly, 
for they will have the fewest complexes as inhibi- 
tions on their mental life, whether that mental life 
be expressed in words or in actions. 

Any situation that reveals the working of the 
complex is called a complex indicator. (That is: 
an indicator of a complex, not an indicator which 



n6 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

is complex in its nature.) In the tragedy of 
Hamlet that part of the play within the play 
where the murder takes place produces the effect 
upon Claudius of making him leave the room in 
confusion. His confusion indicated his complex, 
which was caked about his own guilt, and was 
his complex indicator. In the association experi- 
ments, where a number of words are given to the 
subject and he is told to utter the first word that 
occurs to him, the hesitation he shows in associat- 
ing with some of the words is his complex indicator 
and the word that caused that hesitation is invari- 
ably found to be connected with some complex. It 
has called up some unpleasant memory which he 
wishes to forget, or is unwilling to publish; and 
his hesitation is caused by his trying not to say the 
word which spontaneously comes to his mind, for 
fear it will betray him, but to think of and say 
another. Any hesitation, therefore, is likely to be 
a complex indicator, except in the case of people 
who intuitively know this, and such people often 
betray their complexes by an unexpected or inap- 
propriate fluency or glibness. 

It sometimes happens that there is in a given in- 
dividual only one obvious complex. We all know 
people who are a " little bit off " in one respect 
but are conventional in their actions in every other. 
The eccentricities of genius as well as of ordinary 
persons are examples. George Francis Train 



COMPLEXES 117 

would not speak to an adult for years and sat 
on a bench in Madison Square talking to chil- 
dren and continually ate peanuts. Other persons 1 
peculiarities, such as an inability to touch cer- 
tain substances, velvet, silk, cotton, etc., or a 
diet consisting of rock salt, molasses and butter- 
nuts, or a refusal to eat anything with raisins in it, 
or a belief that some special kind of food is impos- 
sible, like strawberries or cucumbers, all of these 
are eventually traceable to complexes. It is well 
to remember that the complex is always based 
on unconscious thoughts and that the reasons 
given by the persons are not ever the real causes 
of these eccentricities. Most of them are con- 
nected with intimate attitudes toward the ideas 
not merely of nutrition but of reproduction. 

The man who could not eat food containing 
raisins explained his dislike of them by saying that 
he judged all tastes (so-called) by the feeling of 
the food in his mouth, that raisins felt like insects, 
and that he really liked soft and tender foods, in 
spite of the fact that he had a good set of teeth. 
The upshot of it all was that he showed an uncon- 
scious tendency in the direction of breast milk, in 
other words was, while a man in stature and years, 
only an infant in this characteristic, which, indeed T 
as the analysis progressed, was found to be par- 
alleled by infantile traits in other spheres of life. 
Thus he made a demand upon his wife for an ex- 



ii8 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

pression of tenderness of a kind that should have 
been expected only from his mother. He showed, 
too, an attitude toward the world which evinced 
in him an expectation that it would give him 
things, not that he should force things from it or 
even win them by his own efforts. This was side by 
side with traits that enabled him to do acceptably 
the tasks imposed upon him by his business, and 
to be taken by his acquaintances for a man in most 
other respects. 

F. Phobias 

A phobia (Greek word for fear) is a recurrent 
or dominating fear of some object or situation. 
All humans are continuously influenced by fears 
greater or less, the only distinction between the 
ordinary fear and that fear which is called a 
phobia being its strength and the effects which it 
has on the life of the individual. Most of our 
fears are so well hidden that they do not appar- 
ently affect our conduct, but when a fear is so great 
and its effects so numerous and so potent as to 
make our social effectiveness much less, then it be- 
comes a phobia. If, for instance, a fear of any 
situation or thing is so powerful as to prevent a 
person from fulfilling any of his duties toward 
society, such as getting married, then it should cer- 
tainly be regarded as a phobia and the person 
exhibiting it should be analysed. Phobias are of 



PHOBIAS 119 

course as numerous as are things or situations, but 
the more familiar types of them have been classed 
as follows : a fear of closed places, which is known 
as claustrophobia; a fear of open places, which is 
known as agoraphobia; the fear of being alone, 
fear of dirt or germs, fear of the number 13, etc. 
For illustration we may take a case of the last 
named fear from Pfister. " A bachelor forty- 
seven years old carried on a war from his twelfth 
year with the number 13. His sufferings forced 
him to leave school and spoiled his whole life for 
him. He was constrained to pay attention to the 
number constantly. Thirteen minutes before and 
after each hour was a moment of anxiety for him, 
as well as every position of the hands of the clock 
which added up to 13, e.g. 8 : 23. Other situations 
which produced the anxiety were, to mention only 
a few out of hundreds: If it struck eleven when 
two persons were in the room, or if five persons 
were at table at eight o'clock. He could not stay 
away from home thirteen hours. The whole of 
March (3d month), 1910, was an unlucky month, 
in which he did not dare to undertake anything im- 
portant, as well as February, 191 1, etc. The 
hours from five to eight were sinister because five, 
six, seven and eight add up to 26, which is twice 
13. Every thirteenth line of a letter, every set of 
numbers which summed up 13 brought misery. 
He had to shun not only every house numbered 



120 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

13, but all the residents of such a house. . . . 
The most remarkable was the inability to go to bed 
at ten o'clock because he always said three 
prayers." 

The phobias just mentioned are all so-called 
" abnormal " cases, that is, they have gone so far 
to interfere with the regular, orderly and smooth 
working of the daily life of the persons exhibiting 
them. Now, every preference of a negative char- 
acter — that is, every disinclination to do anything 
that has received the sanction of society — is a 
state of mind existing in an otherwise " normal " 
person and corresponding to or representing in the 
normal person the phobia of the abnormal one. 
When you are in Rome, do as the Romans do, is 
an adage that calls for the complete harmonising 
of the individual with his environment. There 
ought really to be nothing in our lives that we 
should not be eager to do, just as our fellows do it, 
if not even a little better, or more enthusiastically. 
To live among people and continually to refuse to 
do the things that the people all around us are 
doing is a restriction upon ourselves that has been 
placed upon us by the independent activity of our 
complexes, developing as they do in the depths of 
our Unconscious, and differs only in degree from 
the well developed and organised phobias that 
have been mentioned above. Disinclinations are 
little phobias; acceptance and acquiescence are 



OUR MENTAL ATTITUDE 121 

normal healthy states of mind. Rejections and 
refusals and declinings are unhealthy, abnormal 
states of mind, for they imply a lack of power to 
cope with the situations rejected or dodged, and 
an unconscious belief on the part of the declining 
person that his constitution, mental or physical, is 
not strong enough to stand the strain. 

" Thus the neurotic battles with spectres, and 
the normal, too, are in the power of unreal forces, 
which lead him now to injury and now to good 
fortune. The liberation from Maya, Illusion, is 
indeed an essential part of the problem of salva- 
tion, but not in the way that Buddhism teaches. 
The emancipation from that which is not actual, 
but which stands in the way of our living our best, 
is necessary for the highest possible unfolding of 
the noblest spiritual powers. But the liberation 
lies only in this new unfolding of the craving. 
Most normals, too, suffer from obstructions which 
rob them of a considerable part of their ability 
to act " (Pfister, Die Psychanalytische Methode, 
p. 128). 

G. Our Mental Attitude 

One of the first problems of the person who is 
confronted with the existence within himself of a 
Titanic force such as the craving of the Uncon- 
scious, is how to regard that Unconscious within 
him. Are we to regard it as a hostile force within 



122 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

the camp, and try to annihilate it? No, for it is 
not hostile to us but only to certain of our limita- 
tions imposed upon us by our necessity of living as 
members of an organic whole, society. Are we to 
be ashamed at the discovery or enlightenment con- 
cerning the true nature of that which is so great 
a part of us, and so great and invisible a factor in 
all that we say or do ? No, for we are not alone in 
that particular. All of our fellows are as clearly 
dominated by the Unconscious as we. Shame 
should arise only from a knowledge of inferi- 
ority of our acts from a moral point of view. And 
our feeling upon learning that this archaic Titan 
is still alive within us should be that we are thank- 
ful for having been warned in time to avoid mak- 
ing at least some of the mistakes that we should 
have made if we had remained ignorant. Are 
we to be so horrified at the revelation of the 
patricidal and incestuous monster that we harbour 
in our breasts, that we feel discouraged and un- 
able to cope with him? No, for we know that its 
primal craving, which for a moment strikes us as 
so savage and brutal, so elemental and over- 
powering, needs only to be harnessed, like Ni- 
agara, to become docile and productive. And 
just as the waters of Niagara have been employed 
to generate electricity for light and power, now in 
small part but possibly later in its entirety, so the 
primal forces of every person living and doing his 



OUR MENTAL ATTITUDE 123 

work in a civilised community are now partly 
available for the purposes most advantageous to 
society, and plans can be made immediately to 
yoke up the whole of each individual's power for 
social and withdraw it from asocial aims. All the 
activities of men, ploughing, reaping, buying, sell- 
ing, reading and writing and studying, belong to 
the type of action controlled by what is called di- 
rected thinking. I said above " partly available 
for society." It seems that as yet all the directed 
activities of men are but a sort of safety valve to 
prevent the social machine from being blown up by 
its superabundant steam. It is clear that if all the 
energy of the human race, now so largely dissi- 
pated in undirected thinking and its resultant 
activities, could be directed toward social aims, 
the numerous ills of humanity, so many of which 
are unnecessary, would be reduced to a mini- 
mum of necessary ills of which there are quite 
enough. 

So if one is told by the psychoanalyst that his 
dreams reveal an infantility, or a strong mother- 
complex or father-complex, he may be assured that 
the dreams of most persons do likewise. Only 
the new information requires a new reaction. We 
are to respond to the new environment of the 
Unconscious that we find ourselves in, by a new 
activity directed along the lines indicated by the 
analysis. The first characteristic of the type of 



i2 4 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

directed thinking is that it fatigues us, and that 
the undirected thinking or phantasying does not. 
Therefore that is to be one criterion by which we 
may judge the results of our new activities. They 
must produce in us a healthy and unworried, un- 
troubled fatigue. There is a great satisfaction 
comparable to the keenest physical satisfaction 
given to mortals, in the complete exhaustion of 
one's powers daily in the pursuit of the most pro- 
ductive ends. This fatigue differs entirely from 
the fatigue of nervous persons in whom there is a 
psychical conflict ever present. Such people are 
fatigued when they begin a piece of work, by rea- 
son of the conflict in their ego caused by the fact 
that they are not united with themselves, so to 
speak, and that every motion that they make is 
opposed by forces within themselves which pull v 
against them in whatever they are doing, and 
make each separate effort twice as hard as it would 
be if there were within them no such opposition 
to everything they do. It is as if they were carry- 
ing a pound of some commodity in a case that 
weighed ten pounds, or as if we gave to a day- 
labourer a shovel weighing fifty pounds with 
which to dig up shovelfuls of earth weighing 
thirty pounds. The test of the right kind of fa- 
tigue is its coming at the end of a day full of toil 
in which we can forget ourselves, and be igno- 
rant of the fact that we are tired until after we 



OUR MENTAL ATTITUDE 125 

stop and look at the clock and find that it is time to 
go to bed. 

This is a strong contrast to the way many peo- 
ple work. They keep looking at the clock and 
yawn, and the unexpired time of their necessary 
hours of labour acts as a drag upon their further 
effort. So, then, the test of the productiveness of 
a day's work is to a certain extent a subjective 
one. No day is well spent if it contains any 
psychical conflicts that interfere with the united 
functioning of the entire psyche in an effort which 
brings at the end, and only at the end, of the day 
a feeling of thorough and satisfactory fatigue, a 
fatigue that is felt more or less as a surprise, and 
which prepares the mind for a complete relaxation 
in sleep. That is not to say that it must be a 
dreamless sleep. It is an undoubted fact that 
there are dreams for every individual every night. 
He does not always remember them, and for the 
person that is using up all his energies every day 
with a resultant satisfactory fatigue, it is quite un- 
necessary to pay any attention to dreams. But if 
there are constant dreams or frequent dreams of 
an unpleasant nature, then their being remembered 
is a sure indication that the person is not using up 
all his energy every day as he should, either be- 
cause there is insufficient activity or because there 
is too much conflict in his ego during the per- 
formance of his appointed task. 



126 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

The almost universally unknown causes of our 
fatigues or our insomnias or our dreams, and, as 
will be seen later, of many of our illnesses, are 
1 the unconscious wishes which, unacceptable though 
they may be to consciousness in their archaic form, 
manage, by disguising themselves as symbols of 
various kinds, to slip by the censor and appear 
incognito in a disguise assumed for the purpose 
of effecting their work, which as may be easily 
seen is at variance with the trend of social evolu- 
tion. 

In order, therefore, to gain a still deeper in- 
sight into the causes why the real motives of our 
behaviour from day to day are so neatly hidden 
from us under such perfect disguises, it will be 
necessary to trace very briefly the course of de- 
velopment through which, as psychoanalysis has 
discovered, the individual psyche passes. This 
development, as thus outlined, is quite different 
in many respects from that hitherto accepted as 
the manner of unfolding of the particular psyche, 
certain qualities being assigned to it by the newer 
psychology, even in the infancy of the psyche, 
which were not formerly supposed to belong to 
that stage of development. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 

Upon the newborn babe streams in from the out- 
side world a multitude of impressions which are 
reacted to according to the few primal desires 
with which it is supplied. The desires or cravings 
first in importance are those of respiration and 
nutrition. The infant has first to breathe and then 
to take food. The contrast in feeling between the 
stream of impressions assailing it from without 
and the prenatal Nirvana in which it has existed 
is so strong that its main desires are to renew the 
feeling of the warmth and calm with which it was 
surrounded before its birth, and the first means of 
accomplishing that gratification is by taking nour- 
ishment. Then begins a struggle between activity 
and passivity, which continues through life, a 
struggle between motion and inertia, between 
effort and relaxation; it might almost be said 
between life which incites the babe to outward 
activities, and death which seeks to drag it down 
to an insensate condition. Then begins the strug- 
gle between reality and pain-pleasure, though the 
struggle does not become conscious until adult- 

127 



128 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

hood is attained, which in some people is never, 
though they live to be a hundred. 

The craving for satisfaction grows along a few 
simple lines, chiefly the nutritional and the sexual. 
Many symbolisms in folklore indicate the close 
relationship of the sexual and the nutritional crav- 
ings, one of which is the phantasy common to 
children and savages that impregnation is caused 
by certain foods. The shock which Freud has 
given to the complacent world of modern con- 
ventionality is due to his maintaining that the 
infant, even from the earliest months, shows un- 
mistakable signs of sexual feeling. This is quite 
contrary to the general supposition that the dawn 
of sexuality is at the time commonly called 
puberty. 

Freud recognises in the infant several different 
areas or zones of the body where feelings are 
located which are sexual in quality. These areas 
are called by him erogenous (love-creating) zones. 
The lip zone and the anal zone and certain zones 
on the skin are said to be the sources of sexual 
feeling in the years of infancy, as are the muscles 
of all parts of the body. True adult sexuality is 
attained when the cravings originating in these 
diverse zones leave them and are centred in the 
genital zone, thereby effecting what is called the 
primacy of the genital zone. 

According to the Freudian scheme the child 



THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 129 

spends its first four or five years in gaining its chief 
satisfaction in life from the stimulation of these few 
zones of sexuality. It gets very little satisfaction 
from the outside world, but most of it comes from 
squeezing as much pleasure as it can from the 
various methods of stimulating these erogenous 
zones. The earliest is the lip zone, and the preva- 
lence of thumb-sucking among children becomes 
the classical illustration of the infantile sexual ex- 
citement. The later or adult form of sexual 
excitement and gratification is regarded by the 
Freudians as composed of the sum of the excita- 
tions of the other zones transferred to the genital 
zone. We thus have a number of sexual feelings 
which are, in the infant, diffused over different 
parts of the body, collected in the adult into one 
part of the body, and so depriving the other parts 
of the capacity of causing sexual pleasure. The 
objection to this theory is merely the logical one 
that he has taken it for granted that the sum of 
a number of elements is in quality the same as, but 
in intensity stronger than, any one of its com- 
ponents. Psychologically, however, it appears 
clear that the infant's sexuality is one that is sepa- 
rated into fragments, located in various places 
and later to be assembled. 

The repugnance against seeing anything of the 
quality or intensity of adult sexual feeling at- 
tributed to children under five years of age is so 



i 3 o MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

strong in most people that they have accused the 
Freudians of reading sex into everything. The 
reply to this accusation is that it is true that all 
excitement is primarily sexual, but that the word 
"'t&exual is to be understood in a very broad sense, 
and that, viewed from the purely scientific stand- 
point, and freed as it should be from all ideas of 
prurience or prudery, there is no reproach in re- 
garding what is admitted as the prime mover of 
human life and activity as an essential character- 
istic of all ages of human life, even of infancy. The 
corollaries of thus attributing sexuality in a broad 
sense to the earliest years of childhood are, as will 
be seen later, so important and so striking in their 
application that the reader will do well to restrain 
if possible his indignation against what he may 
deem to be a wrong view of the innocence of child- 
hood, by reflecting that, in ascribing sexual feel- 
ings to that age, the Freudians do not for one 
moment intend that the innocence and purity of 
the child shall be doubted. 

Developing as it does along various erogenous 
lines which converge later upon the central point of 
the genital zones, the psyche passes from the stage 
where it gets all its satisfactions now from one 
and now from another erogenous zone, and thus 
entirely from its own body, to a stage where it 
begins to differentiate its body from the outside 
world with respect to the satisfaction-giving qual- 



THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 131 

ity now of one and now of the other. The entire 
skin is recognised as one of the erogenous zones. 
The child up to five years of age is without shame 
and enjoys showing his naked body and feeling the 
air and other objects on all parts of it. This 
tendency is called " exhibitionism," and the coun- 
terpart of it is the tendency to " peep " which 
is noticed in him by adults generally only when it 
is directed to things which they think he ought 
not to look at. The child loves " to see and eke 
for to be seye." 

A period in the development of the individual 
psyche is passed through called the narcissistic 
period, from the Greek myth of Narcissus, who 
was infatuated with the view of himself which he 
got in a pool. In this period the child regards all 
things in their relation to itself and not as related 
each with some other thing or with all other 
things. Up to this point the principle of pleasure- 
pain has been the dominating one. Corresponding 
to this pleasure-pain principle which posits that 
the wishes of the child are fulfilled or not in the 
pleasure or pain in its own body, we have as 
another characteristic of the infantile psyche a 
pleasure in inflicting pain upon others, a form of 
cruelty, which is referred to in psychoanalytic lit- 
erature as Sadism (from Count de Sade, whose 
novels exploit cruelty of man to woman). There 
is also a negative form of this called Masochism 



132 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

(from L. von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian novel- 
ist, who depicts this form of cruelty practised 
upon self), which originates in the tendency of 
the infantile psyche to push pleasure so hard that 
it becomes pain, and then to acquire a fascination 
for pain inflicted upon itself. 

This pair of opposites is explained partly by the 
principle of ambivalence, which sums up our ex- 
perience that whatever quality of sensation is 
uppermost in the mind naturally suggests its oppo- 
site. Thus pain suggests pleasure as its relief; 
pleasure suggests pain as its possible termination. 
White is more closely associated with black than 
with any other colour, good with bad, love with 
hate. A parallel is drawn between the intellectual 
and the emotional ambivalence, and a physical 
ambivalence is shown in the fact that any position 
of the body, except absolutely relaxed lying down, 
is maintained only by the constant working of two 
sets of muscles, one pulling against the other. Fur- 
thermore, sensation itself is continued only by a 
change very similar to a change from a quality to 
its opposite, in that without contrast sensation is 
not possible to maintain. An unchanging blue 
soon ceases to be perceived as any colour, a mono- 
tone loses its auditory quality, the same smell if 
continued indefinitely is soon not perceived at all. 
The sensation must constantly be changed from 
what it is to what it is not Thus ambivalence is 



THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 133 

seen to be the very foundation of external per- 
ception. 

From this time on it is possible that a sense of 
reality may be consciously awakened in the child. 
That is, it may begin to be aware that all the 
effects of action may not be the pleasure or pain it 
feels itself. It may begin to know that physical 
effects may be produced by itself upon the outside 
world, effects that are not equally matched with 
states of pleasure or pain in its own body. The 
squeezing of pleasure out of the sensations of the 
child's own body in the different erogenous zones 
leads not only to universal self-abuse of the physical 
kind in infancy, but, at a later date, to very many 
forms of mental activity indulged in for the 
ecstatic quality of the pleasure derived from them. 
When these are recognised as a form of mental 
self-abuse, they are frequently discontinued, and 
all other acts are scrutinised for elements sym- 
bolising this kind of introversion. Part of the 
rage for reading books shown by some young per- 
sons is a form of mental self-abuse in that it is 
centripetal, seeking pleasure not from the outside 
world, but in the inner life, a solitary vice which 
leads to other forms of introversion. While it 
is of perfectly natural origin, and no human but 
goes through a period of it, the normal individual 
inevitably develops away from it and turns his 
activities outward from his own body and mind. 



134 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

The child will then begin to take an interest in 
the actions of other persons, and a stage is passed 
through which may be called the hero-worship 
stage. This is the age before the craving has 
become fixed on the opposite sex, and is the period 
of ardent friendships, boy with boy and girl with 
girl. This state of the psyche has been called the 
homosexual stage, and after a time it gives place 
to the heterosexual stage, in which each human 
normally picks out his or her life mate from the 
other sex. 

The homosexual stage in the development of 
the individual psyche is based on the fact of the 
indeterminateness of sex at one stage in the 
physical development of the individual. There is 
a period in the growth of the embryo when it is 
neither male nor female but may later become 
either the one or the other. Furthermore, there 
is no individual who does not have in an unde- 
veloped state some physical features which are, 
when fully developed in the other sex, accounted 
as essential characteristics of that other sex, e.g. 
the breasts in males and the hair on the face of 
human females. Parallel with his physical bi- 
sexuality runs a psychical bisexuality in all humans. 
In the infantile psyche the sexes are much less 
differentiated than in the adult. Little girls are 
mentally in every way much more like little boys 
than women are like men. In the homosexual 



THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 135 

stage the masculine element in young girls seeks 
out the feminine element in other children, boys 
or girls. Young girls have not, of course, enough 
masculinity to desire the companionship of women 
nor yet enough true femininity to desire the un- 
couth roughness of boys. 

The progress of the psyche in attaining true 
adult masculinity or femininity may be arrested 
at any step. Women with masculine traits, mental 
or physical, are common, as well as men with 
feminine traits. This accounts for much of the 
strong affection of some women, particularly if it 
is the only strong affection in either woman's life, 
and is the cause of much of the devoted comrade- 
ship of men. A highly masculine man is likely to 
have as intimates men with less masculinity than 
he. He spiritually plays man to their woman. 
The over-masculine woman in her intimacy with 
another woman may be spiritually playing man to 
the other woman, who in turn may be ultra- 
feminine and want masculine traits in a friend, but 
not too masculine, as a real man would be. 

The extreme importance of this genetic view 
of the psyche will be appreciated only when we 
realise that the psychical development of any 
human being may be arrested at any one of these 
stages. It not only may be arrested, but it very 
frequently is arrested, or it is uneven, some parts 
of it being more advanced than others even in 



136 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

the same person, with corresponding mental pecu- 
liarities which are noted but not understood by the 
person or his friends. In fact, Freud has gone so 
far as to say that there is not a single peculiarity 
that any individual can show that is not at bot- 
tom a sexual peculiarity, derived from the retarda- 
tion or complete arrest of some part of this sexual 
development, in the broad sense, as briefly out- 
lined above. With this is closely connected the 
CEdipus situation which has been given a short 
exposition in a preceding chapter. The natural 
way for the evolution of the relations of the in- 
dividual to those persons who stand nearest to 
him or her, father, mother, brother and sister, is 
that he or she should before finding a life mate 
be thoroughly separated in feeling from the other 
members of the family, and not be swayed in the 
choice of a mate by any unconsciously perceived 
similarity between the loved object and the 
mother, in the case of the man, or the father, in 
the case of the woman. But psychoanalysis has 
shown that this unconscious element in the choice 
has been very common and is the real cause of 
a great deal of the unhappiness of married life. 
This is indeed the literal application in everyday 
life of the CEdipus myth. It is frequently the 
cause of that mystery — love " at first sight." The 
man who falls in love at first sight with a woman 
is doing so in nine cases out of ten because there 



THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 137 

is a similarity in appearance, voice, complexion, 
nose, hair, ears, eyes or what not, with his first 
love, — namely, his mother. That is a statement 
which will be met with contradiction, vehement 
in proportion to the truth of the statement in the 
individual case. The greatest need for a denial is 
found by those who fear the truth of a state- 
ment. 

It would require far too much space to give in 
detail the various combinations of arrested and 
retarded development in the sexual development 
of the psyche only hinted at above. We all know, 
however, what different features of personality 
are valued by men in their estimation of women, 
and vice versa what different characteristics in 
men are looked for by women. In general it may 
be said that when a girl chooses for her husband 
a man much older than herself, she is taking him 
at least partly because he is in some respects, age 
included, like her father. All the other character- 
istics of older men enter unconsciously into the 
choice, too. The result cannot possibly be as 
happy as if these elements were not predominating 
in the selection. Or if a man marries a woman 
older than himself, it is ten to one that he is 
unconsciously playing a metaphorical CEdipus to 
her Jocasta, and that if he does not tear out his 
own eyes, as CEdipus did, he may do so figura- 
tively, just as did the man who became blind 



138 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

because of unconscious hate of his wife.* (See 
p. 222.) 

An extraordinary case of the QEdipus com- 
plex, or abnormal unconscious fixation on the 
mother, in the case of the man, is described in 
D. H. Lawrence's novel, Sons and Lovers. 

By this time a fairly clear idea may be derived 
of the deep importance for human welfare and 
happiness of the psychoanalytic description of the 
manifestations of the Unconscious in the life of 
the men and women around us. And it must not 
be forgotten, it must never be allowed to slip out 
of consciousness, as we read about these uncon- 
scious fixations of the craving upon the improper 
persons, that they are unconscious, that the per- 
sons suffering them are totally unaware of it, and 
that by virtue of its being a repressed state the 
telling of it as true in their case meets at once with 
the most strenuous denial. They have, in their 
Unconscious, the strongest possible reasons to re- 
ject any such assertion. The general proposition 
that such a close psychical relation between mother 
and son or between father and daughter is bad, is 
readily admitted. It shocks our sense of decency 
to have it called an incestuous relation, as the 
Freudians call it, because we usually restrict in- 

* A too strong affection for the father, on the part of a girl, 
when it amounts to what is known as an unconscious fixation, 
is known as thje Electra complex. 



THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 139 

cest to a physical relation, and we are accustomed 
to regard conscious fatherly affection for daughter 
and motherly affection for son the sweetest affec- 
tions that can be found. This conscious high 
appreciation of each other existing between parent 
and child of opposite sex is, indeed, not what is 
meant here. It is, on the other hand, the too 
close unconscious psychical relation which is the 
cause of so much of the disappointment in mar- 
ried life. It has been found again and again in 
psychoanalytic treatment of various nervous trou- 
bles that they were caused by this unconscious 
fixation, a condition which is discoverable only 
through psychoanalysis. 

It is a case of reducing the whole of the most 
important human relations to the following : ( 1 ) 
the relation of the wife to the husband, and 
(2) the relation of the husband to the wife, de- 
pending largely on (3) the relation of the wife to 
her mother, (4) to her father and, practically the 
same as (3) and (4), her relation (5) to her sis- 
ter or sisters and (6) to her brother or brothers, 
together with (7) the relation of the husband to 
his mother, (8) to his father, (9) to his brother 
or brothers, and (10) to his sister or sisters. But 
the most important of these are (7) the CEdipus 
complex, so called, and (4) the so-called Electra 
complex. As a matter of fact, the relations of a 
man — the unconscious psychical relation is meant, 



140 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

of course — to his mother, his wife and his daugh- 
ter are much the same, any one of them standing 
in the relation of surrogate, i.e. substitute, for 
the other. Similarly the relations of the wife to 
her father, her husband and her son are again 
such that any one of them may be the surrogate in 
the Unconscious for the other. This is a point of 
great importance in the interpretation of dreams, 
as well as in the appraisal of these factors in the 
causation of nervous troubles. 

To return to our statement made earlier in 
this section, we saw that in order to be able to 
make proper selection of a life mate a person 
has to be free from any unconscious fixation upon 
the parent or parent's surrogate of the opposite 
sex. It is quite clear in the case of the man why 
this is so closely connected with the unconscious 
weaning of the man from his mother. If he is un- 
consciously controlled, as so many are, in his 
choice of a wife by his unconscious fixation on his 
mother, he will in picking out a woman be more 
likely to select one who will mother him in more 
senses than one, and in so selecting he is, of 
course, going back to the days of his own infancy. 
That implies that he is — unconsciously, of course 
— himself at the infant level of psychical develop- 
ment. And as he has not progressed beyond that 
level himself he will not have the mental, moral 
and spiritual qualities that will continue to cause 



THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 141 

him to be regarded by his wife as a normal wife 
should regard her husband. If in addition to that 
the wife herself has an unconscious fixation upon 
her father the difficulties are doubled, for she will 
constantly be looking to her husband for qualities 
that she could rightly expect only from her father, 
and which are doubly impossible from a man who 
is unconsciously not a man but in his very rela- 
tions to his wife an infant. 

Thus we get the worst possible combination, 
and it is not at all uncommon. It is true that men 
and women have thus lived together in outwardly 
peaceful conditions and have only been dimly 
aware that something was the matter, but they 
could not tell what. Some have even lived thus in 
blissful ignorance that there was anything at all 
the matter in their married life. I hope no such 
people will have the misfortune to have this book 
fall into their hands! If it does, they may rest 
assured that they are not responsible for their 
misfortune, and that there are plenty of other 
people in the world just like them. 

Of the unconscious relations existing between 
the two parents and the children of both sexes 
as indicated in a preceding paragraph, the one 
which has received the greatest amount of atten- 
tion from the psychoanalysts is the relation of the 
child to the father. The unconscious psychical 
attitude of the child to the father is summed up 



-A 



142 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

in the expression father-complex or father-imago 
or father-image. Now, the word imago was 
chosen by the psychoanalysts to express the ap- 
pearance of the parent to the Unconscious of the 
child. So we speak of the father-image and the 
mother-image. It is interesting to note in this 
connection the meaning of the word imago in the 
ancient Roman customs of funeral ceremonies. 
The imagos or imagines were masks of ances- 
tors modelled in wax and painted, preserved by 
patrician families, and exposed to view on cere- 
monial occasions, and carried in their funeral pro- 
cessions by persons specially appointed to walk in 
procession before the body wearing the masks of 
the deceased members of the family, and clothed 
in the insignia of the rank which they had held 
when alive (Harper's Classical Dictionary). The 
father-image, therefore, is the complex of all the 
attributes unconsciously projected upon the father 
by the child. This photograph on the wrinkled 
film of the child's Unconscious shows the child's 
unconscious psychic reactions to the situation of 
having a father, in which are included all the 
restraints which society imposes upon the physical 
manifestations of the unconscious cravings, to- 
gether with the arbitrary and fortuitous exactions 
of the particular father or father surrogate. 
Analogous remarks might be made concerning 
the mother-image. 



THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 143 

The imago thus represents in its comparative 
extent in any given individual a measure of the 
development of the psyche toward a separate 
existence. If the mother- or father-imago is 
found by analysis to play in the Unconscious of 
any individual a greater part than it should, the 
psyche is by so much short of its proper inde- 
pendence. Jung maintains that the father-image 
is responsible for most of the ills of neurotics, and 
that if there is no father's personality in the his- 
tory of the case, there will always be found a 
dominating influence exerted by the grandfather. 
The father-image, together with the mother- 
image, is seen to be closely connected with the 
GEdipus complex in that it reveals a too great 
fixation of the Unconscious upon the mother and a 
corresponding hostility to the father. A study 
which has been made by the psychoanalysts of the 
unconscious reactions of an only child to the father 
and mother situation, shows that it is very difficult 
for an only child to acquire the unconscious sepa- 
ration from the images successfully to attain inde- 
pendent happiness. 



( 



CHAPTER VIII 

DREAMS 

If questioned about their dreams, most people 
called normal will say that they rarely or never 
dream, or that they have a recurrent dream of so 
peculiar a nature that they cannot explain it. The 
general attitude toward dreams is that they are of 
little significance for the past or the present and 
of none whatever for the future of the individual. 
The modern theory of dream analysis, however, 
contradicts both these statements. 

The first dictum of the present theory of dream 
interpretation is that the dream is an expression 
of the craving of the Unconscious or, in other 
words, that it represents the ideal fulfilment of a 
wish. After the acceptance (positive or nega- 
tive) of the statements already made in this book 
about worry and sympathy — namely, that worry is 
a fear which is in turn a negative wish, and that 
sympathy is always a negative wish, albeit a wish 
nevertheless — it will be easier to refute the natural 
objection that the dream of the death of a be- 
loved relative or of a dear friend is the repre- 
sentation of the fulfilment of a wish, a wish being 

144 



DREAMS 145 

the definite specific form taken by the general crav- 
ing already mentioned. 

A man dreams that a burglar enters his room 
and that he fires a pistol at the intruder again 
and again, and the bullets hit the burglar every 
time, but do not kill him. After telling me this 
very brief dream the dreamer asked me what I 
could make out of it. I told him that the com- 
plete analysis of any dream would take hours of 
study, even a dream so short as this. But I 
pointed out to him that the evident wish in this 
dream was to accomplish something the real doing 
of which was in some way frustrated. I asked 
him if he had not been dissatisfied with the quality 
of some of his performances. He admitted with 
an expression of much regret that he was wasting 
a great deal of his time which should have been 
more profitably employed. He read reams of 
novels which he forgot as soon as he had read 
them. 

The analysis of a dream, according to the prac- 
tice of the Freudian psychology, consists of the 
so-called free associations of the dreamer. In a 
quiet room free from all interruptions the analyst 
studies his subject (or patient, as the greater part 
of work on dreams in the newer scientific way has 
been carried on by physicians who have adopted 
the Freudian methods in their practice), or anal- 
ysand, as the subject is sometimes called, who sits 



146 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

in an easy-chair or lies on a couch. In these cir- 
cumstances, which to many persons appear very 
absurd, when they consider the unusualness of the 
situation, the analysand is instructed to utter 
whatever comes into his head, without the least 
selection, and not to be afraid to communicate 
anything, no matter how trivial. On the principle 
already referred to that the Unconscious is most 
unobstructed when the least possible restrictions 
are placed upon it, there come up the most ab- 
surdly unconnected thoughts, even though they 
start from the topics mentioned in the dream. But 
it has been found over and over again that noth- 
ing really irrelevant comes to mind. When it is 
reflected that the object of the study of the dream 
is to ascertain the character of the unconscious 
thoughts, and that the unconscious thoughts are 
usually repressed, it will be seen that there could 
hardly be devised a better way to get them to the 
surface. 

Most persons would consider such a mental 
operation an extremely unprofitable procedure, as 
indeed it is for those whose Unconscious does not 
trouble them too much. But when a physician to 
whom they are paying good money assures them 
that apparently the most inconsequential thought 
is yet closely connected with the states of mind that 
are causing a physical disorder, the whole process 
begins to look less ridiculous and they go on. But 



DREAMS 147 

the analysand soon finds that the thoughts do not 
come so easily. The restraints imposed on him 
by the censor (the projection upon him of the 
conventionalities of present-day social relations) 
have been so uniformly respected by him and he 
has been so constantly in the habit of refusing 
utterance to the inane fancies that have occurred 
to him now and then, that he experiences, espe- 
cially at the first interviews, a certain embarrass- 
ment born of the desire to talk sense, a*nd to keep 
to a certain topic, remaining relevant according to 
the conventional ideas of relevance, and some of 
the thoughts that occur to him in these seances 
seem so grotesquely remote from his purpose in 
consulting the physician that he hardly has the 
face to speak them out, thinking that it must be 
wasting valuable time, both his own and the physi- 
cian's. But this point of view is exactly the one 
that the analysand is most desired not to take, but 
to pour forth without restraint everything with- 
out regard to whether it appears to him to have 
a connection with anything at all. If all that is in 
the mind of any individual could be taken out and 
examined by the expert modern psychologist, it 
would at once be evident just what were the most 
predominant thoughts and it could easily be dis- 
covered what was the reason for the subject's in- 
ability to act as a perfectly coordinated member of 
society. But this exhaustive inventory of the 



148 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

contents of the individual's mind is quite impos- 
sible of accomplishment, and the dream analysis is 
designed to take the purest utterance of the Un- 
conscious, the dream, and supplement it by the 
thoughts evoked by the dream, and thereby to get 
a sort of cross-section of the stream of the uncon- 
scious thoughts, and, with that as a sample, to 
form an estimate of the mental lack of order (to 
avoid the use of the word disorder) which is re- 
flected or projected through the subject's slightly 
averted relations with society, and by bringing 
these into full consciousness to straighten out their 
slanting, not to say crooked, character, and to 
readjust the subject in all his relations to the com- 
munity in which he lives. 

But to continue the account of the analytic pro- 
cedure. After the analysand has set himself to 
speak out, without restraint, the thoughts that 
occur to him in connection with the dream, he 
realises that there is some force opposing the 
straightforward outgiving of his fancies. This 
force is known as the resistance {W id erst and) . 
If this resistance is overcome, depending entirely 
upon the rapport between the analyser and the 
analysand, there arises a confidence felt by the 
latter toward the former, and realising the real 
interest of the former and the possible importance 
and bearing upon his case of the ideas that previ- 
ously seemed so inconsequential, the analysand is 



DREAMS 149 

then capable of more like what seems a heart-to- 
heart talk. This change of heart is known as the 
transference (Uebertragung) — see Chapter XI — 
and is considered an essential factor in the suc- 
cessful analysis of any mental difficulty.* 

I will call the reader's attention once more to 
the fact that the content of the dream is entirely 
L symbolical, and say that the exact meaning of the 
symbols of the dream can be understood only by 
means of a thorough analysis by an expert psy- 
choanalyst where all restraints upon the expres- 
sion of the unconscious craving are removed. 
The next step in the dream study is the interpreta- 
tion, which is based on the analysis. 

I might illustrate the three steps in dream study 
by means of the burglar dream. The dream has 
been given above, the analysis in this case con- 
sisted solely of the remark of the dreamer that 
he was dissatisfied with the results of his life work 
as a physician, and the fact, quite evident in the 
conversation, that he was a confirmed stutterer. 
The stuttering is interesting in relation to the 
repeated shots at the burglar. They are both ex- 

* A note should be added here as to the length of the process 
of psychoanalysis. It varies according to circumstances, from 
one sitting to hundreds. Daily talks for eight months or a year 
may be necessary to resolve some of the problems brought by 
people who are physically sound, according to medical examina- 
tion, while a single sitting has been known to remove a serious 
difficulty that has endured for years. 



150 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

amples of frustrated effort. The interpretation 
was that the dreamer needed to give more time 
to serious work in medical research.* 

The most palpable characteristic of dreams in 
general is their apparent absurdity, or at least 
triviality. But psychoanalysis has shown that 
there are no absurd or trivial dreams. t Every 
dream, expressing as it does an unconscious wish 
on the part of the dreamer, is a very important 
part of him. When rightly interpreted, it is an 
indication of what he really wishes and what he is 

* This is the simplest possible example. I will give a slightly 
more complicated dream with its analysis and interpretation, but 
will say that one case of a girl otherwise very intelligent and 
quite normal, but who had a case of hysteria, has been reported in 
a European psychoanalytic journal, in an article which occupies 
180 pages. 

f It is important that the reader should recall at this point the 
facts concerning the nature of the censor, — namely, that he is that 
part of our psyche which represents in us the force of society 
which is continually at work upon us as long as we continue to 
be members of any social unit. The censor acts as a sort of 
restraint upon our simply and openly carrying out the wishes 
of the archaic and infantile Unconscious within us, and not 
only prevents us from doing things that would be detrimental 
to the unity and best development of the social system in which 
we live, but in the more civilised communities prevents us from 
even thinking such wishes consciously. The success of this 
effort of restraint is seen in the fact that civilised persons have 
so few crassly immoral dreams. The work of the censor is so 
complete that the immoral, that is to say unsocial, nature of the 
wishes constantly striving for utterance is absolutely hidden by 
him from the dreamer's conscious life, and can be revealed 
only by psychoanalytic research. 



DREAMS 151 

all the time unconsciously striving for, no matter 
what his conscious ideals may be when expressed 
in words. The reason why our dreams are so 
whimsical, so nonsensical, so bizarre, so appar- 
ently inconsequential, is that the true nature of 
the wishes which are the substratum of all our 
conscious activities is such that it is almost never 
acceptable to the conscious part of ourselves, and 
is therefore under the necessity of being very 
much changed before it is presented to conscious- 
ness. This changing is the work of the so-called 
endopsychic censor, and produces a series of pic- 
tures which are but symbols of the wishes in 
which the dream originated. 

The result of the dream analysis is to replace 
almost every picture in the dream. as we remem- 
ber it with others. The first set of pictures mak- 
ing up the dream as we remember it is called the 
manifest content of the dream. The new set of 
pictures, to carry out this pictorial metaphor, 
which is arrived at by means of the dream analysis, 
is called the latent content. It is this latent con- 
tent which is clearly significant of our uncon- 
scious trends. It is not to be understood by this 
that the latent content of the dream is something 
fixed that can be developed by the chemical action, 
so to speak, of the analysis, like the developing 
fluid with which we produce a photographic nega- 
tive. The process of interpretation is a very 



152 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

long and complicated one and the result is never 
complete. Some dreams are indeed not analysable 
at all. An interpretation can be inferred, from 
the general knowledge that the analyst may have 
at his disposal, from his greater or less experi- 
ence, and there is a class of dreams that are 
called typical dreams because they are dreamed 
in almost the same way by a great many people. 
These typical dreams are therefore likely to have 
the same interpretation for all people who dream 
them, though the exact application is different in 
different cases. 

The dream of the burglar given above may be 
taken as an example of the difference between 
the latent content and the manifest content of any 
dream. In this case the manifest content is the 
dream exactly as it was related, while what was 
latent in it, and what was brought out in the very 
brief conversation which took place concerning it, 
was that there was a desire on the part of the 
dreamer to accomplish something that would have 
a great effect upon other people. The greatest 
effect that one could have upon the life of other 
people would naturally be the greatest change 
that could be wrought upon another and the great- 
est change that can happen to life is to be changed 
into its opposite, death, so that the latent content 
of this dream, or at any rate a part of the latent 
content, is here indicated. The dreamer is dis« 



DREAMS 153 

satisfied with the effectiveness of his performances 
in his professional life and dreams of something 
that is as far removed as possible from the desul- 
tory nature of his everyday occupations. 

Another illustration of the difference between 
the manifest content and the latent content is 
found in the dreams of Pharaoh, in the Bible, 
which were interpreted by Joseph. In this case 
the interpretation consisted almost solely of the 
translation of the manifest content into the latent 
content. " The seven good kine are seven years; 
and the seven good ears are seven years: the 
dream is one. And the seven thin and ill favoured 
kine that came up after them are seven years; and 
the seven empty ears blasted with the east wind 
shall be seven years of famine." 

This is again an interpretation of a dream with- 
out any recourse to analysis, the analysis of the 
dream being the contribution of modern science 
to the knowledge of dreams. It will be noted that 
the interpretation of dreams, as practised by as- 
trologers and charlatans, contains no study of the 
mental processes of the dreamer, but that the 
modern dream theory discussed here starts with 
the mental content of the dreamer, as indicated 
in cross-section by the free associations of the 
dreamer suggested by the dream. 

I will give here a dream in which the first asso- 
ciation gave the clue to the latent content. The 



154 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

dreamer relates his dream as follows : " I seem to 
be with Tolstoy in Siberia. Am in a small room 
looking out through a door into a court and hear 
Tolstoy trying to make someone understand over 
the telephone. He yells at the telephone, but 
gets no satisfaction and comes in where I am. I 
offer to get his mail for him when I go to Vol- 
hyniansk. He says some Russian in a very soft 
and pleasant way and I do not understand it, 
though I seem to know what he means." The first 
association with this dream was Leo, then lion, 
then father. As this was a dream of a patient 
who was being analysed, and was communicated 
to the physician and worked out in his presence 
some seven months after the beginning of the 
treatment, the reference to father may be easily 
understood. The physician in such a case gen- 
erally takes the place in the Unconscious of the 
patient which the father took in the childhood of 
the patient, — that is, a position of authority and 
direction of activities, — and this dream, like others 
that have been dreamed by patients, is in effect a 
sort of protest of the Unconscious against the 
obscurities of some parts of the psychoanalytic 
treatment. The dreamer says to the analyser in 
this dream : " You are talking a foreign language 
to me. More than that, it is almost as bad as if 
you were talking Russian to me over the tele- 
phone. You are very pleasant to me personally, 



DREAMS 155 

but to my Unconscious, which you seem to be try- 
ing to get in communication with by telephone, you 
are extremely impolite, not to say savage. If you 
would come down a bit from your lofty position 
as an authority and even talk your native language 
to me directly, I should at any rate seem to under- 
stand." 

The difference between the manifest content of 
the dream and its latent content may be amusingly 
illustrated by means of the following quatrains 
contributed by Deems Taylor to the Century 
Magazine in 19 12. 

Ape Owe 'Em 

When fur stews can this sill leer I'm 

Toot rye tomb ache theme e'en ink Lear, 

Youth inked wood butt bee weigh sting thyme; 
Use eh, " It's imp lean on scents shear! " 

Gnome attar ;. Anna lies align! 

Nation mice lender verse says knot — 
Fork rip tick poet real Ike mine, 

How Aaron weal, demesnes allot. 

This bit of humour shows in a number of ways 
the relation between the dream and waking life. 
First of all it is immediately comprehensible to a 
person hearing it read aloud by another person, 



156 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

which shows that its cryptic appearance is due 
largely to the same causes that make the dream 
unintelligible at first sight, — namely, that it is 
taken at first glance as a real visual entity. Of 
course the effort to make sense out of it from the 
purely visual point of view is useless. It needs 
to be rearranged into an auditory series. Then 
the sense of the verses becomes clear at once. 
And just as the purely auditory apperception of it 
by a second person renders it comprehensible to 
that person, while it still remains obscure or non- 
sensical to the one who is looking at it and is mis- 
led by the different spelling of the same sounds, 
so the dream, as a predominantly visual thing, 
necessarily deceives the dreamer, and he needs the 
different point of view of a second person to re- 
arrange the elements, all of which, to be sure, are 
in themselves reproductions of realities (English 
words in the verses) and might make sense if used 
in other connections, but are illogical as they occur 
in the dream, just as are the separate words in 
the verses. In the case of the dream the second 
person is the analyser. It is impossible for an 
ordinary uninitiated person to interpret his own 
dreams; it is only after he has learned the special 
methods of unravelling the condensations and dis- 
placements and other transformations to which 
the dream has been subjected by the activity of the 
censor that he can begin to be an interpreter of his 



DREAMS 157 

own dreams. It is not the purpose of the present 
writer to go into the details of such unravelling, 
but merely to indicate the nature of the process. 
Thus the dream has to be studied in the greatest 
detail to find out what it really means to the 
dreamer. Just as the words " Gnome attar " in 
the second quatrain are immediately understood 
if the same sounds are spelled " No matter," so 
the several elements of the dream, whether they 
are pictures or words, must be examined com- 
paratively, and their relations to each other and 
to the dreamer ascertained by a study of the men- 
tal material of the dreamer as exhaustive as 
it is possible to make. The difference in accent 
between the words " Ape Owe 'Em " and " A 
Poem " illustrates the difference between that part 
of the manifest content and the latent content of 
the dream which is produced by the displacement. 
Just as the stress accent of these two phrases 
differs in pronunciation, so does the emotional ac- 
cent of the latent content of the dream differ from 
that of the manifest content, inasmuch as elements 
which in the latent content are of the greatest 
possible importance are represented in the dream 
frequently by elements to which no importance 
can be assigned. 

The manifest content of the dream has been 
produced by four main processes which are called 
condensation, displacement, dramatisation and 



158 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

secondary elaboration. The process of condensa- 
tion implies that each element of the dream is like 
the composite photographs which are made by- 
exposing the plate or film to a number of persons 
and getting a combination photograph in which all 
the similarities are emphasised and the differences 
are more faintly registered. 

In illustration of the work of condensation 
Freud, in his book on the Interpretation of 
Dreams, gives the following which was dreamed 
by himself: 

" I have written a monograph on a species of 
plants. The book lies before me ; I am just turn- 
ing an inserted coloured plate. Near the illus- 
tration is fastened a dried specimen of the plant." 

The circumstances which were condensed in 
order to form the manifest content of the dream 
as here given were, among others, these : In the 
the window of a bookstore he had seen the day 
before a monograph on the cyclamen; he had him- 
self once written a monograph on cocaine, which 
was associated in his mind with a conversation with 
a Dr. K. the previous evening, which he considers 
the actual dream instigator. Botanical mono- 
graph is connected in his mind with a Professor 
Gardner, his blooming wife, with a patient named 
Flora, and with a lady to whom he had told a 
story about some forgotten flowers. Monograph 
is associated with the one-sidedness of his profes- 



DREAMS 159 

sional studies and the fondness he had for collect- 
ing monographs and making collections of other 
kinds. The cyclamen was his wife's favourite 
flower. It will be seen by this example that the 
botanical monograph is, as it were, a condensation 
of a number of realities and thoughts. This com- 
posite character of each particular factor of the 
manifest content of the dream is expressed in 
other terms by saying that the factors are " over- 
determined." This does not mean that they are 
superfluously determined or caused by an over- 
plus of unconscious factors, but that each element 
of the manifest content of the dream is, like every 
other manifestation of the Unconscious, produced 
not by one assignable cause but by a number of 
causes. Over-determination means, therefore, not 
superfluous determination but multiple determina- 
tion. This is true of practically every dream, and 
the dream analysis consists of the free associa- 
tions connected with the topics of the dream, as 
these associations are evoked at the time. This 
is for the purpose of separating out the several 
elements which were condensed to form each 
factor in the manifest content. From the ele- 
ments thus separated out there emerge the 
thoughts expressive of the unconscious trend which 
it is desired to discover. 

The second change mentioned as characterising 
the transition from the latent to the manifest con- 



i6o MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

tent of the dream is the displacement. This re- 
sults in a change such that some circumstances 
which in real life are considered of the greatest 
importance are, in the dream, given a minor part 
to play, while things that in our waking life are 
thought of as the merest trivialities are given the 
most prominent place. The result of this, as may 
well be seen, is to turn the values of ordinary 
life quite upside down, and necessarily gives many 
dreams the appearance of being the purest non- 
sense. Thus, in the dream of Tolstoy the remote- 
ness of Siberia and the foreign element of the 
Russian author were possibly produced for the 
purpose of escaping the vigilance of the censor, 
who would not have allowed the biting criticism 
of the methods of the analyser to be openly ex- 
pressed. They were admitted to consciousness 
only by way of a complete transmutation into 
images that were merely symbolical of the original 
dream thoughts. 

After recognising in the dream the latent con- 
tent and the manifest content which has been made 
out of the dream thoughts that constituted the 
latent content, and seeing how the manifest con- 
tent, or the dream as it appears to us when we 
remember it upon awaking, has been formed by 
the processes of condensation and displacement, 
we are now obliged to consider a third factor in 
the process of dream formation, a process to which 



DREAMS 161 

has been given the name of secondary elabora- 
tion. In many dreams there occurs the thought, 
" Why, this is only a dream," particularly in some 
types of unpleasant dreams,- where this idea seems 
to be in the nature of a double reassurance. On 
the one hand we are reassured that the unpleasant 
features of the dream are not real, and on the 
other hand we are assured that we may go on 
sleeping. This is regarded as an instance of the 
contribution from the conscious life to the forma- 
tion of the dream, and is taken as a good example 
of the way in which the dream is worked out 
from the point of view of consciousness, or as the 
secondary elaboration of the dream. The primary 
elaboration would be the working of the exclu- 
sively unconscious factors which have, as it were, 
prepared the dream for delivery into conscious- 
ness. But the condition in which it is presented 
for acceptance into the conscious life is so foreign 
to the mode of thinking of conscious life, on 
account of the changes that have been wrought 
in the original dream material by the processes of 
condensation and displacement, that our conscious 
mind is obliged to change it still further in order 
to make it clear enough to be remembered. This 
process of secondary elaboration is somewhat 
analogous to the change in an idea made by pre- 
senting it in the form of words after it has been 
originally presented in the form of a picture. It 



( 



1 62 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

might almost be said that the difference between 
our dream as we really saw it and as we remember 
and recount it is like the difference between a 
picture and the verbal description of a picture. 
The picture is one thing to the person who is look- 
ing at it, but quite a different thing to the person 
who merely reads a verbal description of it. This 
is due in part to the various associations that the 
words of the description may have in the mind 
of the reader. It is quite similar in the case of 
a dream that I am trying to narrate, even to my- 
self. If we regard the dream as the work partly 
of the Unconscious, and if we remember what has 
already been said about the origin of ideas in 
general from the Unconscious, it will be easy to 
see that the words in which I communicate my 
dream to another person, as well as the words 
in which I even attempt to account for it to myself, 
are supplied to me also by the Unconscious. So 
that even in the act of putting the dream into 
words, no matter for what purpose, there is a 
deflection, so to speak, given to the account by 
the Unconscious. The account of the dream is 
more or less under the control of the Titan, just 
as the dream itself is. We may say, therefore, 
not only that we dream the dream, but that in a 
certain sense we dream the words in which we 
narrate the dream. This applies not only to the 
words that actually appear as a part of the 



DREAMS 163 

dream, such as the name Volhyniansk in the dream 
of Tolstoy given above, but also to the words 
that are " selected " for narrating or describing 
the various episodes of the dream. Frequently, 
indeed, the words so " selected " seem even to 
the dreamer ridiculously inappropriate. The 
dreamer often says that the words he has used are 
unsuitable, but that he cannot think of better ones. 
Or he has the feeling that a figure in the dream 
may be a man, or it may be a woman, but he is not 
sure which; he said a man, but thinks that prob- 
ably a woman was what he really meant to say. 
This state of mind shows the unconscious factor 
which is so large in the formation of the dream 
still acting in the account of the dream. 

When I spoke above of the words being 
selected to describe the dream, the question natu- 
rally arose as to who selected them. The narrator 
of the dream selected them, of course. But what 
part of him selected the words? The unconscious 
part of him. The same element in his nature 
which supplied the pictures of his dream also 
supplied the words with which to describe them. 
This seems the more natural as many dreams that 
are written out as soon as the dreamer wakes, 
and are laid by for a time, seem entirely foreign to 
him after a month or so and he cannot remember 
any more about them than if they were the dreams 
of some other person. If dreams are written out 



1 64 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

upon awaking they are frequently written in a sort 
of dreamy state, and in this case the secondary 
elaboration of them approximates most closely to 
the primary elaboration which is the unconscious 
formation of them. But if a dream is remem- 
bered and related to the analyser after a lapse of 
some hours it has had time to crystallise into a 
definite form which is kept constant more or less 
by means of the words in which it is cast. If it 
is not put into words except at the time of the 
analysis, it takes a form which may change, if a 
repetition of it is requested by the analyser upon 
a subsequent occasion. Freud has with great in- 
sight pointed out that the discrepancies which thus 
creep into the account are sometimes of the great- 
est service in giving a clue to the most important 
meaning of the dream. It is believed that a sec- 
ond narration of the same dream which omits 
some of the details of the first narration leaves 
these out on the same principle on which things 
are forgotten generally, — namely, that those 
things are most readily forgotten which are asso- 
ciated in the mind of the individual with occur- 
rences that are unpleasant to him. These factors 
of the dream which in a first narrative are present 
and which are lacking in a second account are 
thus thought to be an indication of what the Un- 
conscious is trying to conceal, and therefore to be 
a clue to what is most desirable to bring to light 



DREAMS 1 65 

and have the emotions connected with them 
worked off in the wholesome atmosphere of 
psychoanalytic procedure. 

Freud regards the secondary elaboration as a 
contribution made by the waking thought to the 
formation of the dream, and that the censor is 
regularly a sharer in the work of the dream 
formation (I.e., p. 350). The result of this co- 
operation of the conscious in the making of the 
dream is to change the dream in the direction of 
a more rational occurrence, more like the experi- 
ences of waking life than it would be otherwise. 
The secondary elaboration therefore is effected 
largely in accordance with the laws which govern 
the familiar process of day-dreaming or reverie. 
A careful examination of the elements of the 
dream sometimes leaves us in considerable doubt 
as to whether the elements of the dream, or at 
least some of them, are not entirely supplied 
directly from the conscious life from this very 
source of day-dreams, so that it is said of some 
dreams that they have first been dreamed in the 
daytime and have then been brought to fuller con- 
sciousness in the dreams of the night. The rapid- 
ity of some dreams is thus explained. Freud 
cites a dream of a dramatist, who, during the first 
few lines of the play, at which he fell asleep for 
a couple of minutes in his chair behind the scenes, 
dreamed that the play had been played through, 



1 66 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

the proper places enthusiastically applauded and 
the whole thing a grand success. He also notes 
(p. 357) that in the case of some dreams we can- 
not be sure that what we remember about them is 
what was really dreamed or not. Finally, he be- 
lieves that a number of dreams are so faultlessly 
logical in their form that it is evident that they 
( liave been completely worked over by the con- 
scious part of the psyche. Such dreams are to be 
regarded, or at any rate the apparent interpreta- 
tion of them is to be regarded, with suspicion, 
because they do not really in this case say what 
they appear to say, any more than the extremely 
nonsensical dreams do.* 

A dream is thus seen to be not a fixed product 
that has a definite and unalterable form, but a 
living thing, which may go on developing if more 
attention is given to it, and the secondary elabora- 
tion of it is seen to be that part of it which de- 
velops generally after the dreamer has waked, 
and its extent is seen to be governed by the greater 
or less proximity to the sleeping state on the part 
of the person narrating the dream. The dream 
occurs in sleep and the secondary elaboration of 
it takes place in transferring it from the sleep- 
ing state to the waking state. 

♦Freud (Traumdeutung, p. 459) says: "We have called the 
dream absurd, but examples teach us how clever the dream is 
in making itself absurd." 



DREAMS 167 

An important consideration in the study of 
dreams is the fact that the material at the dis- 
posal of the Unconscious for making the dream 
is primarily visual. We rarely dream except in 
pictures. We see things in dreams. Vision is 
sometimes a synonym for dream. Very infre- 
quently do we dream words, and almost never do 
we dream smells or tastes. The primarily visual 
nature of the dream calls, then, for a characteristic 
of dream formation which has been called " re- 
gard for presentability " or " dramatisation." 
The ideas that are more abstract therefore are 
not as such presentable in dream form, so that if 
the Unconscious wishes for instance to express the 
idea of criticism, it has to do so by means of 
representing a man talking a foreign language, as 
in the dream about Tolstoy talking Russian over 
the telephone, or about " a man dressed in a 
Roman toga, talking Chinese, and preaching a 
Hebrew religion." Similarly a dream cannot 
represent " if," but instead represents what might 
be as actually occurring. 

The effect of our daily life upon our dreams 
is expressed as follows: "The thought activities 
continue in sleep, not only those that are not fin- 
ished on account of an accidental interruption, but 
also those that are not settled because we have 
exhausted upon them, problems of various kinds, 
all our thinking powers for the time being, and 



1 68 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

those matters that in waking moments are rejected 
or repressed, together with matters that are quite 
indifferent and therefore do not require any con- 
scious mental effort." " The residue of the day's 
impressions furnishes a copious contribution to the 
dream, and it is by their means that the content 
of the dream finally pushes its way into our 
consciousness. The unassorted experiences of the 
past day occasionally dominate the content of the 
dream, and cause it to continue the day's work; 
they may have any other nature whatsoever besides 
that of being a wish, and there is a whole class of 
dreams which originate predominantly or exclus- 
ively in the residues of the daily life." Some factors, 
therefore, of every dream are likely to be directly 
traceable to the experiences of the previous day. 
With regard to the part played in the formation 
of the dream by the wish-fulfilment, it may be said 
that " some dreams, as those of children, are evi- 
dently wish-fulfilment dreams, while the others are 
wish-fulfilment dreams that have been disguised in 
every possible way." (Freud, Traumdeutung, p. 

435-) 

With regard to the status of the wish in the 
dream, it is said that " the wish may be stirred up 
during the day, and remain for the night as a 
recognised and unsatisfied desire, or it may have 
occurred by day but have been denied, remaining 
for the night likewise an unsatisfied but repressed 



DREAMS 169 

desire, or it may have no connection with daily 
life and be one of those wishes which become 
active only at night because they belong to the 
repressed matter of the Unconscious " (p. 433). 

" The conscious wish, on the other hand, be- 
comes a dream instigator only if it succeeds in 
arousing a cooperating unconscious element by 
which it is reinforced." 

Furthermore " the wish represented in dreams 
is inevitably an infantile wish" (p. 435). This 
accounts for the necessity of the dream's being 
apparently so trivial and bizarre, because the na- 
ture of the infantile wish is such that it is most 
contrary to the restrictions placed upon us by 
society, and has to be very much changed in ap- 
pearance in order to get by the censor. 

Freud gives (Traumdeutung, p. 440) an ac- 
count of the psychical nature of the wish, as he 
understands it. " There is no doubt that the 
psychical mechanism has attained its present per- 
fection only by passing through a long evolution. 
Let us imagine it in an earlier stage of its efficiency 
before it has been so elaborately developed. 
Presuppositions that are based on other considera- 
tions tell us that the mechanism above all makes 
the effort to keep itself as free as possible from 
stimulation, and for that purpose assumes as its 
first form that of a reflex mechanism which al- 
lowed it immediately to transfer to a motor path 



170 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

any sense stimulus that reached it. But the neces- 
sity of life disturbed this simple function, and 
produced the impulse to the further complication 
of the mechanism. The necessity of life occurs to 
it first in the form of the great bodily needs. The 
excitation set up by the inner need will seek an 
outlet in motility, and may be described as an 
' inner transmutation ' or as the ' expression of 
affective process.' The hungry child will cry or 
kick helplessly. But the situation remains un- 
changed, for the excitation proceeding from the 
inner need corresponds not to a momentarily push- 
ing but to a continually acting power. A change 
can take place only if in some way by means of 
some external aid coming to the child a satisfac- 
tion is found to remove the inner excitation. An 
essential constituent of this experience is the 
appearance of a certain perception (in the ex- 
ample, food) whose memory-image remains asso- 
ciated from this time on with the trace of the 
memory of the excitation of the need. The next 
time this need arises, there will result, thanks to 
the connection that has been established, a psy- 
chical activity which will again fill out the memory- 
image of that perception, recall the perception 
itself and therefore exactly reproduce the situa- 
tion of the first satisfaction. Such an activity as 
that is what we call a wish, the reproduction of 
the perception is the fulfilment of the wish and 



DREAMS 171 

the complete revival (or filling out) of the per- 
ception from the point of view of the excitation 
of the need is the shortest route to the fulfilment 
of the wish. It is no obstacle to us to suppose that 
there is a primitive state of the psychical mechan- 
ism in which this route is actually so traversed, 
and the wish therefore turns into a hallucination. 
So this first psychical activity aims at an identity 
of perception; namely, at the repetition of the 
perception which is connected with the satisfac- 
tion of that desire. 

" Thinking in general is nothing but the sub- 
stitute for an hallucinatory wish, and it is quite 
comprehensible that the dream is a wish-fulfil- 
ment, as nothing but a wish can drive our mental 
activity to work. The dream which fulfils its 
wishes in a short regressive way has in so doing 
only preserved for us a proof of the mode of 
operation of the psychical mechanism which is 
primordial and has been given up as being ill 
adapted to its end. In the night there appears as 
an exile what used to dominate our daily life at 
one time, when the psychic life was still young 
and incompetent, somewhat as in the nursery we 
find again the bow and arrow, the abandoned 
weapons of a stage of humanity now outgrown. 
Dreaming is a piece of infantile mental life that 
has been overcome. In the psychoses these modes 
of operation of the psychic mechanisms, elsewhere 



172 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

in waking life suppressed, are again forced into 
currency, and then bring to light their unsuitability 
to satisfy our needs in the direction of the outer 
world." 

The dream is the chief means by which we may 
penetrate deeply into the Unconscious. Freud 
calls it the royal road to the Unconscious. The 
first call on the part of the psychoanalyst is for 
the dreams of his subject. From them, through 
his knowledge of the processes which distort the 
dream into its manifest content, he learns the true 
condition of the psyche in its relation to the ideal 
psychical development and can cause the subject to 
see the multiform manners in which the Uncon- 
scious has deceived him. Far from being non- 
sensical the dream has been shown to be incapable 
of either nonsense or untruth, if the symbolic 
language in which it is necessarily expressed is 
rightly understood and translated into the lan- 
guage of conscious life. 

The method of inference both as to the existence 
and the nature of the Unconscious and as to the 
significance of its several manifestations in dreams 
and in other hitherto unconsidered ways such as 
errors of speech and the sudden ideas that unac- 
countably pop into our heads is well illustrated 
by the anecdote related by Thackeray in his 
Roundabout Paper : " On Being Found Out." 

" You remember that old story of the Abbe 



DREAMS 173 

Kakatoes, who told the company at supper one 
night how the first confession he ever received was 
— from a murderer, let us say. Presently enters 
to supper the Marquis de Croquemitaine. i Pal- 
sambleu, abbe,' says the brilliant marquis, taking 
a pinch of snuff, ' are you here ? Gentlemen and 
ladies ! I was the abbe's first penitent, and I made 
him a confession which I promise you astonished 
him.' " 

Just as the statement of either the abbe or the 
marquis alone is absolutely inadequate to prove 
the latter a murderer, so the manifestations of 
the Unconscious are unified only by a similar com- 
parative method, the significance of the dream is 
shown only after comparing it with the thoughts 
that are associated with it, and the " symp- 
tomatic '" character of certain physical manner- 
isms is inferred only by comparing them with 
other outcroppings of the Unconscious into con- 
scious life. 

No account of the interpretation of dreams 
would be complete without a reference to the de- 
velopment of the theory of Freud contributed by 
C. G. Jung of Zurich. Not satisfied with the 
materialistic interpretations put upon dreams by 
Freud, Jung thinks that they have not merely a 
retrospective meaning, but have a meaning for the 
present and a value for the future. Freud is 
criticised by Jung for tracing too much of the 



174 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

dream back to the period of infancy, and to ex- 
clusively sexual causes. This gives it a meaning 
which is of less value. It would be merely dis- 
heartening to be obliged to regard the dream 
solely as an indication that the Unconscious is 
crassly material in its strivings, for it would then 
never be able to help man toward any form of 
idealisation. Jung therefore sees in the dream 
not only a psychic product absolutely determined 
by preceding causes in the strictly scientific sense 
of today, but regards the dream as an aspiration 
toward a higher form of intellectual and spiritual 
life. 

Thus the dream about Tolstoy given above 
may be said to contain not only the dreamer's 
protest which would be an infantile craving for 
superiority in criticising, which means seeing a 
better method of handling than that of the psycho- 
analyst, but also a striving after that better view 
of life. Jung holds that there is besides the 
purely animal instincts which are brought to 
light by the process of psychoanalysis a much 
greater power for social cooperation. Comparing 
the psychoanalytic procedure with the maieutic 
method of Socrates, — than which, however, psy- 
choanalysis goes much deeper, — Jung empha- 
sises the very great social value of the newer 
method, in that those who are fortunate enough 
to have not only their baser natures but their 



DREAMS 175 

greater capacities revealed to them by this means 
are provided with " a philosophy of life founded 
upon insight and experience " which enables them 
" to adapt themselves to reality." * 

* Analytical Psychology (tr. Long), p. 376. 



CHAPTER IX 

TWO KINDS OF THINKING 

In the chapter on dreams we took up the con- 
sideration of a kind of mental process called free 
association in which the person who was doing 
the thinking allowed his thoughts to come as they 
would and purposely withdrew from them any 
guidance whatever. He was obliged to learn the 
art of keeping his hands off his own thought, and 
it was found that that art was not so very easy to 
learn after all. In other words, there is in the 
adult civilised human a species of control or 
criticism exercised over all his thinking, particu- 
larly that in which he is trying to think for an 
audience, and above all when that audience con- 
sists of one person, and that person is known to 
be receptive to all the peculiarities of thought 
which may characterise the person under investi- 
gation. The very thought that I am under in- 
vestigation, and that defects are what it is desired 
to find, naturally makes me instinctively and un- 
consciously endeavour to hide those defects. 
Thinking then takes a form and a certain direc- 
tion which is determined by my idea of what the 
psychoanalyst wishes to find out about me. It is 

T76 



TWO KINDS OF THINKING 177 

almost impossible for me not to imagine what it is 
that he wishes to discover in me and if it is much 
to my discredit, I am but human if I try to conceal 
it. And we saw that the principal thing that we 
had to learn in the matter of letting the free 
associations go on as they would was to utter 
without the least restraint even what to our think= 
ing seemed the most absurd conceits that might 
come into our heads. There are some things of 
which it is quite unlikely that a person even in the 
privacy of his own bedroom ever allows himself 
to think. It is quite unlikely that a perfect 
abandon in this kind of reverie ever takes place 
in normal persons, for they would think it but 
the raving of the insane. Why should the average 
normal do anything but shrink from losing or 
throwing away control of himself in that manner? 
The vitality of the unconscious craving is much 
like a river that has been dammed in order to 
supply water power to run mills. If the dam 
shows any defects it may be necessary to take 
down a part of it, in order to repair it. If the 
dam were all knocked down at one instant the 
collected waters would do much damage in the 
valley below. It has to be taken down gradu- 
ally by engineers and the accumulated waters 
drawn off slowly. A certain part of the dam 
is taken down first according to the plan of the 
engineer. In this simile we have a good illustra- 



178 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

tion of the concept of directed and undirected 
thinking. The waters of the river before the 
dam was built are an example of a completely- 
undirected stream, undirected except by the forces 
of Nature, who has been there from the beginning. 
But for human purposes it becomes desirable to 
direct the power of the water from its natural bed. 
Exactly in the same way it becomes desirable to 
direct the stream of the unconscious craving from 
the course which it has followed for ages. The 
original damming of the unconscious stream began 
later, but still long ago in the time when it be- 
came necessary for people to live together in 
families, in clans, in phratries. Every drop of 
water, every drop of human individual life falling 
on the earth from the rainclouds of the cosmic 
craving finds itself sooner or later hemmed in by 
this dam which is always present in all social 
systems of even the lowest degree of organisation. 
Almost every drop of water is destined to be 
directed through the raceway and to take its part 
in turning the mill wheel. 

The points which this simile illustrates are that 
in the stream of mental life there is almost no 
possibility of the existence of absolutely undi- 
rected conscious thinking, no matter how great 
efforts may be exerted to attain it. The undi- 
rected thinking consciously attained in the free 
associations of the psychoanalytic method of re- 



TWO KINDS OF THINKING 179 

search are undirected only in a greater degree than 
those of ordinary thinking. The dam is, so to 
speak, partly taken down but not entirely. The 
extent to which the dam is taken down measures 
the degree of " transference " mentioned in Chap- 
ter XI and the success of the analyser in dis- 
covering the main currents of the craving which 
is the cause of the disturbances he is to remove. 
On the other hand, there is in the streaming of 
the unconscious craving a great amount of water 
that spills over the dam and whose power is 
wasted, power which should be directed into the 
raceway and help to turn the mill, a member of 
the figure of speech here used which represents 
the purely human element. 

So, then, we have the natural forces of the 
unconscious craving collected by society for purely 
social purposes and diverted from their natural 
course. It will be worth while to examine the 
details of our hour-to-hour mental life from this 
point of view exclusively, as to whether they are 
examples of directed or undirected thinking, and 
not to forget that the amount of directed thinking 
that any given individual does is a measure of his 
usefulness to society, just as the amount of water 
that runs through the raceway is a measure of the 
amount of power available for the constructive 
work of civilisation. In every person there is a 
certain amount of time of each day spent in con^ 



1 80 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

scious reverie, which is a form of undirected think- 
ing and as nearly undirected as is likely to occur 
in that person. There is also a certain amount of 
undirected thinking going on in the Unconscious in 
all personSo We have reason to believe that those 
persons having the greatest amount of conscious 
undirected thinking are the ones in whom the undi- 
rected thinking in the Unconscious is greatest in 
amount. And vice versa, those persons whc have 
most advantageously disciplined their conscious 
thoughts are the ones in whom the unconscious 
mental processes are the most productive. In the 
normal human, then, the two streams run side by 
side and function parallel with each other and, in 
great part, connectedly. The president of a large 
business corporation who spends a couple of hours 
a day at his desk and can afford to spend a great 
deal of time in recreation is an example of the 
parallel alignment of the two systems of conscious 
and unconscious mentality. While he may be to 
all external appearances playing golf at his coun- 
try club, and apparently devoting to the game all 
his energies and enthusiasm for the time being, it 
is quite certain that he has succeeded in getting 
his Unconscious to take over for him the solution 
of a number of problems, and that when, the 
next day, he returns to his office, his mind will be 
made up on a great many matters which needed 
his attention and his decision. It is a familiar fact 



TWO KINDS OF THINKING 181 

that some intricate mathematical problems are 
solved during sleep. Freud, too, notes that a 
number of the operations in the dream work are 
already completed in the Unconscious during the 
day, and are ready for incorporation into the 
dream-fabric at night. 

On the other hand let us take for example, 
instead of the experienced executive, an ordinary 
person in whom the conscious mental processes are 
not so completely directed to socially organised 
ends. For eight or ten hours of three hundred 
days in the year he works at his occupation. If he 
is systematic, he succeeds in accomplishing more 
than if he is not, which is the same as saying that 
the more his energies are directed according to his 
plan or system, the greater will be his constructive, 
his productive work. That applies, however, to 
the three hundred times eight or ten hours in the 
year or to about 2,400 to 3,000 hours of working 
time, all of which is not by any means exclusively 
devoted to concentrated directed thinking, even 
though we admit as directed thinking all forms of 
directed or productive action. Variation is very 
great, as everyone knows, in the productiveness 
of different people's time even in the hours called 
work hours, from the laziest street cleaner to the 
most continuously operating telephone girl. But 
16 hours of waking day leaves anywhere from 
2,840 to 3,440 hours in the year which by most 



1 82 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

people are spent in undirected thinking. From 
this must be subtracted all time spent interestedly 
and actively in sports and games. These are as- 
suredly to be recognised as a form of directed 
thinking, although they may not ever be as pro- 
ductive as the activities especially devoted to bread- 
winning. The quality of the attention, however, 
during a great deal of the time that men are play- 
ing games is highly questionable. It all depends 
on how much of the time is actually spent on the 
movements of the game and how much on talking 
small talk. 

The amount of time in a year that is not used 
up in mental operations designed to attain a defi- 
nite purpose other than mere killing of time, is 
admittedly very great for almost all persons. 
When it is reflected that all this time is spent in 
actively or passively carrying on undirected think- 
ing, which is popularly called reverie or day- 
dreaming, and in psychoanalysis is called phan- 
tasying, it will be realised how very large a pro- 
portion of the time of every one of us is spent in 
laying the foundations of future miseries. There 
is scarcely a more pitiful sight than old age slip- 
ping into imbecility because of not having a body 
of organised directed thoughts to fall back on, 
and there is nothing more inspiring than the in- 
tellectually green old age of some of the world's 
great thinkers and performers. 



TWO KINDS OF THINKING 183 

Now, the substance of the undirected thinking 
which we allow ourselves to become entangled in, 
as in a net, is nothing but the more or less dis- 
guised wishing of the Unconscious. If we let the 
thing go on developing as it wills, we shall have 
a result that is as archaic and infantile as is the 
untrained Unconscious itself, as we day by day slip 
nearer to "second childishness and mere oblivion." 
As the child is economically a burden which has 
to be carried by the other members of society, and 
begins to lose the attribute of being a burden only 
when, and in proportion as, it takes upon itself 
duties which relieve others from its own care and 
permit its caretakers to transfer their activities 
from this duty to a mere productive sphere, so 
any relapsing of the individual back into the 
state where he has to be cared for, as in old 
age, is a direct slip back into a state of infan- 
tility. 

In other words, all the natural and uncontrolled 
cravings of the Unconscious are archaic and in- 
fantile, for the sole and simple reason that they 
are not adapted to the furthering of the organisa- 
tion of society. The serviceability, therefore, of 
any concrete instance of thought or action is the 
only standard by which we can judge whether the 
mind is phantasying or not in entertaining it. If 
directly or indirectly it is found to be serviceable 
to mankind, it has to be accounted directed think- 



1 84 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

ing. If it is not thus serviceable it is inevitably 
a phantasy. The only redeeming quality that 
imagination can have is the quality of contributing 
something to someone other than the person who 
is doing the imagining. The reference of our 
thoughts to the existence of any other person re- 
deems them from being absolutely selfish, which 
is absolutely introversional, which is completely 
phantastic. So it comes about that every phan- 
tasy is a step in the direction of isolation from 
others and every act of directed thinking is a 
step toward association with others. The pic- 
ture of those who have walked too far toward 
isolation from their fellows is given in the words 
of a celebrated European alienist (speaking of 
dementia-precox patients in an asylum) : 

" The patient who wishes to isolate himself 
from reality must permit the environment to act 
upon him as little as possible, but he must also 
not wish to influence it actively himself and for 
two reasons. By doing so he would become dis- 
tracted from within and obliged to heed the ex- 
ternal world so as to be able to act upon it; 
furthermore, through the action itself he would 
create new sensory stimuli and other relations with 
reality. The autistic and negativistic patients are 
therefore mostly inactive; they have actively as 
well as passively narrowed relations with the outer 
world. 



TWO KINDS OF THINKING 185 

" But the autistic patients have not alone a 
positive reason for busying themselves undis- 
turbed with their own ideas where they see their 
wishes fulfilled. The imagined happiness is not 
absolute. It is destroyed not only through the 
influences of the outer world and the conception 
of reality, but in its place appears much oftener 
under such circumstances the sensation of the op- 
posite of the wish unfulfilled in reality. All these 
patients have a life wound which is split off from 
the ego as well as may be and hidden by an oppo- 
site conception. For that reason they must defend 
themselves against any contact with their complex; 
and as in the split-up thought process of the 
schizophrenic, everything so to speak may have 
its association with the complex, so everything may 
be painful which comes from the outside. . . . 

" By means of this conduct the patients carica- 
ture and exaggerate only one of the usual mani- 
festations of the normal. It is a general experi- 
ence that questions which relate to complexes are 
at once answered in the negative even when the 
persons wish to be open and afterward speak of 
it without dissembling. For there exists an in- 
stinctive tendency to conceal the complex. Nor- 
mal persons, likewise, see to it that their life's 
wound is not touched upon, and they also often 
have in misfortune the tendency to withdraw 
within themselves, because by contact with others 



1 86 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

there are so many things that root up the pains, 
by association with the complex." * 

I have spoken of carrying on undirected think- 
ing either actively or passively. The active type 
is best represented by the ordinary casual course 
of everyday conversation between friends and ac- 
quaintances, in which no information about mat- 
ters of fact is transferred from one person to 
another, but only matters of feeling. If A tells 
B how he felt or gives him a long account of what 
he did, the details of which B cannot visualise or 
follow in any other form of imagination, A is 
only uttering a string of his own phantasies or 
unconscious wishes symbolised in one form or an- 
other, and the chances are that B will reply with a 
line of phantasies of his own couched in language 
descriptive of a motor trip or a shooting-party, 
etc. Such conversation never leads anywhere and 
in real social value is on a par with any other 
species of phantasying. Everybody would admit 
that a life made up exclusively of that would be 
utterly without value. 

Another very concrete illustration of the active 
kind of phantasying is the writing of a certain 
kind of letter, which with its physical concomitants 
is frequently but a symbolism of the unconscious 
wishes of the writer. 

*Bleuler: Theory of Schizophrenic Negativism, trans, by 
William A. White, New York, 1912 (p. 20). 



TWO KINDS OF THINKING 187 

If a person sits down to write a letter that he 
does not very much want to write and begins by 
biting the end of the penholder, he shows in that 
act the working of the Unconscious on his actions. 
The biting of the end of the penholder is a return 
to the nutritional level, because the Unconscious 
of the man, or to whom the man belongs, does 
not want to take the trouble to write a letter any- 
way, because there is no reward held out to It. 
If It were going to get any immediate return for 
writing the letter, It would go about the epistolary 
labour with great eagerness. Plenty of ideas 
would rush in and the conscious part of the man 
would have a plentiful selection from which he 
could choose the best according to his taste and 
judgment and produce a very fine result. But 
this Unconscious is " not a good letter writer " ; 
everybody knows it, and the sense of inferiority 
aroused in the Unconscious is the cause of some 
unpleasant ideas being stirred up in the basement 
where the fellow lives. It is exactly as if the fel- 
low were told, " You can't do that," and believed 
it. Here comes in the feeling of necessity for 
a sense of mastery somewhere. If the fellow can- 
not eat one thing he must eat something else. He 
must be eating all the time, figuratively speaking. 
He must get, all the time, his feeling of superior- 
ity, and, as in a previously mentioned case, if he 
cannot get it out of one situation he will abolish 



1 88 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

the whole situation. The feeling of inferiority 
before the pen, and the sense of not being able 
to cope with the letter-writing situation, immedi- 
ately require the satisfaction to be supplied from 
some other source, and the Unconscious will ac- 
cept that satisfaction from the nutrition or sem- 
blance of nutrition to be absorbed from the end 
of a penholder. That is why the diffident writer 
begins by biting the end of the pen. It is much 
as if in a house that was supplied by two electric 
lighting companies one of the currents failed and 
the occupant of the house immediately turned on 
the other. He had to have light at any cost. But 
it happened that one of the companies was able 
to sell the current at a very much cheaper rate 
than the other, and that the man who turned on 
the other current the minute that the first current 
was temporarily put out of commission was doing 
a ruinously expensive thing. That is what might 
be said of the person who begins to write a letter 
by taking nourishment from the end of a pen. 
He is doing something that is ruinously expen- 
sive to him, not merely from the point of view 
of the wasted time, but from the point of 
view of the misdirected development of his 
Unconscious. 

We have considered here merely the physical 
manifestations connected with the attempt to write 
a letter in which the would-be writer was not very 



TWO KINDS Of THINKING 189 

strongly interested. The mental aspects of the 
same situation are familiar to everybody. This 
person — man, woman or child — sits in the well- 
known position with head thrown back as if he 
were some sort of receptacle about to have some- 
thing poured into him. He actually waits for 
ideas to occur to him. That is really the only 
thing that all ideas ever do, as they are supplied 
by the Unconscious. And in a certain sense his 
consciousness is only a reservoir into which rises 
a stream of mental states, all of them having their 
subterranean source in the Unconscious. It may 
be said that the ideas that are contributed to this 
stream by the factor of sensation coming in from 
the outside world do not rise from the Uncon- 
scious. But while this is literally true as a fact, 
it does not represent the whole truth, for the sen- 
sations from the outside world are so much 
changed by the action of the large body of the 
Unconscious that they may be said to be the 
product more of the Unconscious part of the per- 
ceiving mind than the product of the world of 
reality. 

To return to our hypothetical letter writer. If 
no ideas come to him, there he sits and wriggles. 
If they do come, we know that they come from 
the Unconscious, and are selected by the Uncon- 
scious for purposes best known to Itself. How 
many letters have contained mostly a list of 



190 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

wishes, a list of misfortunes which might happen 
to the recipient, but all of them mentioned either 
by their negatives or their opposites or contraries! 
Whether you write to your friend that you hope 
that he will have good weather on his vacation, 
or that you hope that he will not have bad weather, 
they of course both amount to the same thing, 
which is that your Unconscious hopes that he 
will have bad weather. Otherwise why mention 
weather at all? It is the same thing whether you 
write that you hope that he will arrive safely, or 
that you hope that he will not meet with any acci- 
dents, both of these expressions of good will really 
meaning that your Unconscious would be most 
interested to hear that he was well shaken up in 
an accident. Otherwise why mention accidents at 
all? If accidents to your friends were not upper- 
most in your Unconscious, which from the in- 
feriority point of view takes all other persons as 
rivals whose downfall It desires, you would men- 
tion them not at all. They would simply not occur 
to you as you sit with pen in mouth. There are 
some persons who are continually asking after the 
emotional states of their acquaintances, if they 
had a good time, if they enjoyed themselves, how 
they felt, etc.* This interest is never sincere 

* Holt (/. c, p. 8) tells of a man who tormented his wife and 
incidentally the friends that were present, for two hours on a 
quiet moonlight evening, by asking her if she was not chilly, if 
he should not bring her a shawl, etc. 



TWO KINDS OF THINKING 191 

from the point of view of the Unconscious, how- 
ever sincere the speaker and hearer or writer and 
reader may consciously think they are. In a cer- 
tain sense there is a class of ideas that ought never 
to be mentioned among people who think them- 
selves friends. That would seem to cut out the 
expression of sympathy. It would. There is no 
good reason for the existence of most of the 
sympathy in the world. For let us analyse sym- 
pathy and see what is in it. By virtue of its his- 
tory the word sympathy means feeling with, imply- 
ing that when you sympathise with a friend you 
feel with him, — that is, have the same feeling that 
he has, — and that you are triumphant in the belief 
that he will feel better if he knows that you are 
feeling bad at the same time. Taking a concrete 
instance, if your friend cuts his finger accidentally, 
you can best serve him, supposing of course that 
you are really desirous of serving him, by acci- 
dentally cutting your own finger, and letting him 
know how much it pains you. That is a literal 
" feeling with," a paralleling of one misfortune 
by another, as if two misfortunes made a fortune. 
The next remove from this is the paralleling of 
the real misfortune by an imaginary one. Your 
friend cuts his finger in this case and you, instead 
of actually taking a knife and accidentally con- 
triving to cause it to inobservantly cut you, cry 
out that you feel as if you had been cut, you can 



192 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

imagine exactly how the lancinating pain of the 
severed flesh must exquisitely anguish the unfortu- 
nate friend. Or you recall with realistic detail 
how you or your uncle or cousin suffered in 
the same or similar circumstances. The really 
thoughtful person does not want any sympathy, 
for he knows that unless he is willing to have 
misery doubled in the world, he is unwilling to 
have his misfortune propagated to return upon 
him later with interest, as it would be if it were 
really so contagious as sympathy would try to 
make it. Of course it will be said that here we are 
really not talking of the best form of sympathy, 
but of the worst. Granted. Expressions of sym- 
pathy, then, are to be expunged from our budget 
of conversation. We see now, I hope, whence 
all expressions of sympathy arise. But we began 
to talk about the difference between directed 
thinking and what psychoanalysis has called phan- 
tasying, and find ourselves in an unsympathetic 
treatment of the feeling called sympathy. Now, 
what is the verbal expression of sympathy but an 
instance of a sort of undirected thinking which is 
for the time taking the rightful place of directed 
thinking or action? There are appropriate words 
and actions that may helpfully be said and done 
in times of suffering, but they do not include much 
if any verbal expression of regret. We know 
now that the mental state called sympathy is but 



TWO KINDS OF THINKING 193 

the outpouring of envy, revenge and other hos- 
tility from the depths of the Unconscious. The 
recipient of such sympathy always pretends to be 
very much gratified and eased of his misery, but 
he is only prevaricating according to the immemo- 
rial usage of his equally deluded forebears. But 
the duplicating, by means of words, of the pain or 
suffering of some other person is nothing but the 
elaboration of the unpleasant situation, a dwell- 
ing on the thoughts and sensations of the agonis- 
ing circumstances, and a prolongation or propaga- 
tion of the misfortune, the only purpose of which 
could be the preparation of the victim to suffer 
greater ills with more heroic fortitude. The 
verbal expression of sympathy is a case of phan- 
tasying or undirected thinking, that is the kind of 
archaic thinking that the Unconscious is always 
doing until we get it partly trained or its nose 
ringed, so that it can be made serviceable for 
society. 

The variety of undirected thinking spoken of 
above as passive is illustrated in the reading of 
novels, stories and fiction of all kinds and even the 
reading of some newspapers and magazines. The 
clearest and most undiluted form of it, however, 
is the ordinary day-dream or reverie. It needs no 
description, being perfectly familiar. The phys- 
ical accompaniments of it are also well known; 
the motionlessness, the far-away look in the eyes, 



194 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

the difficulty of interrupting it when it has gained 
a good hold upon the victim, hardly need to be 
mentioned. 

Jung, in his Psychology of the Unconscious, 
says of the directed thinking that it is character- 
istic of civilisation since the Middle Ages, that its 
most developed form exists in modern science and 
that the ancient civilisations were without it and 
all their thinking was of the undirected kind as 
seen in works of art and in myths, the essential 
quality of which was the phantasy. 

" Here, we move in a world of phantasies, 
which, little concerned with the outer course of 
things, flow from an inner source, and, constantly 
changing, create now plastic, now shadowy 
shapes. This phantastical activity of the ancient 
mind created artistically, par excellence. The ob- 
ject of the interest does not seem to have been to 
grasp hold of the ' how ' of the real world as 
objectively and exactly as possible, but to aestheti- 
cally adapt subjective phantasies and expectations. 
There was very little place among ancient people 
for the coldness and disillusion which Giordano 
Bruno's thoughts on eternity and Kepler's dis- 
coveries brought to modern humanity. The naive 
man of antiquity saw in the sun the great Father 
of the heaven and the earth, and in the moon the 
fruitful good mother. . . . Thus arose an idea of 
the universe which was not only very far from 



TWO KINDS OF THINKING 195 

reality but was one which corresponded wholly to 
subjective phantasies" (p. 25). 

Other characteristics of the directed form of 
thinking are that it is generally carried on in 
words and that it fatigues the thinker. The first 
of these brings up the problem of the possibility 
of thinking without words, which we have no 
space here to discuss, except to remark that think- 
ing without words is more likely to be phantastic 
than thinking with words, which, owing to their 
long evolution as symbols of thought and to the 
great advantage of the symbol over any other 
form in expressing abstract ideas, are better fitted 
than any other medium of expression for com- 
municating our thoughts. The fact that directed 
thinking fatigues the thinker and that he turns 
away from it as soon as possible and fulfils the 
wishes of the unconscious craving in allowing it 
to wander as it wills, restricted only by the sym- 
bolism necessary to disguise it in order to get by 
the endopsychic censor, explains why there is so 
much time given by all people to the undirected 
variety. 

Intellectual sloth is the characteristic of by far 
the greatest majority of even the so-called culti- 
vated people, and havmg accomplished a few 
hours of mental work they think they are tired 
out, that it will injure their brains to work con- 
stantly and so on, all these generalities being pre- 



196 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

texts furnished forth by the unknown Titan 
within them who wishes to continue his wishing 
uninterrupted. No horse wants to take a bit in 
his mouth, and, until he has been broken, it is a 
difficult task to make him take it and allow himself 
to be harnessed. The Titan within us must be 
harnessed and he will then work with and for us 
as does the horse. Not even a horse is a valuable 
member of society until he can do some work for 
it. If intellectual laziness were not so universal 
the moving-picture business would not have grown 
to such enormous proportions in this country. 
The placing of moving-pictures within the reach 
of everyone has put in everyone's hands the power 
to indulge without restraint in the tendency to 
phantasy, as the scenarios are for the most part 
written, consciously or unconsciously, with a view 
r to supplying for everybody the fulfilment of their 
most extravagant wishes. The impossibilities of 
fairy lore are represented on the screen as actu- 
ally visible and the tramp artist has only to draw 
a sketch of a glass of beer, reach forth his hand 
and take it from the paper and drink it before 
our very eyes. 

The worst feature about the undirected variety 
of mental action is that it produces in the indi- 
vidual a habit of squeezing as much pleasurable 
affect as possible out of every mental experience. 
The undirected thinking proceeds solely upon the 



TWO KINDS OF THINKING 197 

basis of the principle of pleasure-pain and not 
upon that of reality, so that all the phantasies in 
which the psychic indulges are selected for their 
pleasure-giving quality. This does not exclude 
the undirected thinking of an apparently unpleas- 
ant quality, such as worry, for we saw in Chapter 
VII that there is a sort of pleasure derived from 
a certain degree of pain. The evil result of 
squeezing pleasure out of our phantasies is that 
the affects so heightened in this intemperate way 
are generally increased out of all due proportion 
with their normally exciting causes. In being thus 
exaggerated they are necessarily shifted in the 
mind from experiences which should have affects 
of that degree to experiences which should pos- 
sibly have no perceptible affect tone at all. This 
has for one result the misplacement of affects in 
the Unconscious, and it is one of the contributions 
of psychoanalysis that the misplaced affects in the 
Unconscious are the causes of many nervous dis- 
eases. Misplacement of affect is partly due to the 
composite nature of the physical expression of the 
affect, and we shall see in the chapter on the cure 
of disease that some ideas are, as it were, dis- 
missed from the realm of directed thinking, those 
ideas in short which are connected with affects or 
emotions so painful that we do not wish to enter- 
tain them consciously. These ideas, dismissed 
during the process of undirected thinking, are the 



198 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

ones that gain an independent individuality in the 
Unconscious, and by virtue of the emotions con- 
nected with them, become subject to the conver- 
sion into physical symptoms accompanying the 
various diseases of psychogenic origin. 

It is thus clear that the only course to pursue 
in a situation containing painful emotions is to 
retain the situation in consciousness, and subject 
it to directed thinking until the elements of the situ- 
ation are classified and reacted upon in the social, 
and not in the asocial way, the latter being the 
way of phantasying which dwells only upon the 
pleasurable elements in any situation and ignores 
— that is, represses into unconsciousness — the 
painful ones. The only wholesome release from a 
situation full of pain is activity toward a recon- 
struction of the circumstances which occasion the 
pain. It is never a wholesome handling of the 
painful situation merely to go over the different 
incidents mentally and alone, for that course but 
emphasises the possibilities of finding some pleas- 
ure in the situation, and the hunt for pleasure is 
the natural trend of the Unconscious on the low, 
pleasure-pain level. 

Some of the occasions in everyday life on which 
we are momentarily thrown off the track of the 
directed thinking on which we may at the time be 
engaged, will be given in the next chapter. Most 
of these illustrations of the temporary shifting of 



TWO KINDS OF THINKING 199 

our psyche from the directed track to the undi* 
rected are sometimes otherwise known as instances 
of absent-mindedness. In our work, in which we 
think we are following out a definitely planned 
course, and are not side-stepping from it, we some- 
times find ourselves making mistakes or doing 
other slightly irrational things. These interpola- 
tions of the Unconscious are usually of very brief 
duration. We find ourselves doing or saying an 
inappropriate thing, and we immediately recover 
our lost control and continue with our work. Some 
persons consider such a getting off the directed 
track as a perfectly inconsequential thing and pay 
no further attention to it, except in cases where, 
at an important time, our Unconscious has made 
us say exactly the opposite of what we consciously 
intended to say. Then very likely we wonder what 
could have caused us to make such a bad mistake, 
and we wish we had a way to find out the cause 
of it. Psychoanalysis supplies the means not only 
of solving these problems but also of preventing 
a recurrence of the errors. 



CHAPTER X 

EVERYDAY LIFE 

Just as the factories have turned their wastes to 
profit by employing chemists to devise means for 
making use of them as " by-products," so psycho- 
analysis has, like the industrial chemists, turned 
to good account a number of mental products 
which would before the present day have been 
called utterly useless and trivial. I refer to the 
slips of the tongue and pen, to erroneously car- 
ried out actions, to certain types of constant for- 
getting, as well as to dreams, which are dis- 
cussed in another chapter. Persons in perfectly 
good health, too, are sometimes pursued by a word 
which occurs to them without any apparent rea- 
son, and repeatedly, until they begin to wonder if 
it has any significance for their mental sanity. 
One man was pursued by the word " pentako- 
simedimne." Its recurrence troubled him and he 
took it to a psychoanalyst and found out after a 
short period of study where it came from. It is 
not in any dictionary, but it is a word of a type 
that Lewis Carroll called a portmanteau word, — 
that is, a word composed of parts of two or more 

200 



EVERYDAY LIFE 201 

other words and having a meaning that is a sort 
of compromise between the two meanings of 
the original words. Thus in the famous poem 
" Jabberwocky " where the Unconscious-inspired 
bard says that " 'Twas brillig and the slithy toves 
did gyre and gimble in the wabe " he explains the 
word slithy as being a combination of lithe and 
slimy, suggesting at the same time that the mean- 
ing of the new word contains the meanings of the 
two old words of which it is composed. Similarly 
the word " pentakosimedimne " was analysed by 
the specialist and found to contain behind its 
Greek elements a condensation of a number of the 
difficulties that beset the path of the person in 
question, which being in this way called to the 
attention of the puzzled individual were of not a 
little service to him in freeing himself from those 
difficulties. If he had gone on being troubled by 
the persistence of this word's being forced into 
consciousness, he would probably have thought 
that he was beginning to lose his mind, and lost 
time, strength and efficiency in worrying about it. 
But the satisfactory result of his being able to 
have the phenomenon properly analysed was that 
he understood not only the meaning of the word 
but also the cause of the word's coming into con- 
sciousness. A further satisfactory result of the 
taking of the word into the sphere of directed ) 
thinking is a result that almost invariably is at- 



202 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

tained in such cases. The word, having lost its 
mysterious and unaccountable character, and hav- 
ing been brought into the realm of ordered scien- 
tific thought, ceased to recur. That episode was 
closed, both in the Unconscious and in conscious- 
ness. The affects or emotions connected with it, 
which might easily have gone on developing below 
the threshold of consciousness, and might have 
been converted into a physical symptom, were 
worked off in the air and light of scientific knowl- 
edge and left a good instead of a bad effect upon 
the psyche. This indicates a very wholesome 
practical procedure for anyone who is troubled 
by the mysterious appearance of any thought in 
consciousness. It makes no difference whether 
this thought is in the form of a word or a picture 
or a bit of music which keeps " running in one's 
head," or even the memory of an odour, a not 
impossible thing, we know that there is a per- 
fectly legitimate natural cause for its occurrence, 
and if we cannot find the opportunity to have 
it analysed or are unable to analyse it ourselves, 
we may be assured that it is not a sign that we are 
losing our minds, but that on the contrary it may 
be a warning sent up from the Unconscious con- 
cerning something that we may be acting unwisely 
about. It then behooves all persons, if there 
enters a mystery into their minds, to take the 
most businesslike methods they are capable of to 



EVERYDAY LIFE 203 

order their life as well as they can, and as quickly 
as they can, in all particulars. The day may come 
when all teachers, even of the lowest grades, may 
be trained in the art of analysing their pupils. 
Pfister's book * was written for the special pur- 
pose of applying the principles of psychoanalysis 
in the schoolroom. But until the day comes when 
teachers are expected to know not only their sub- 
jects but also their objects, the pupils, psycho- 
analysis will be an expensive luxury to be had 
from non-medical specialists in this branch of psy- 
chology and from only a few of the most promi- 
nent neurologists. 

Freud began his work with the mentally dis- 
eased. His attention was then called to the part 
played in the neuroses by the dreams of the pa- 
tients, and their very great value not only in 
diagnosing but also in alleviating the disorders. 
Then he wrote his book on the interpretation of 
dreams, and later still, seeing the fine gradations 
between the sane and the insane, he wrote a book 
on the psychopathology of everyday life, in which 
he gives examples of mistakes in reading and 
writing, in ordinary actions of various kinds, all 
of them occurring in persons who could never 
under any consideration be classed as insane. 
The fundamental thesis of this book of his is that 
all our actions, even the unintentional ones which 

* Cited pp. 68, 119, 121. 



20 4 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

crop out as mistakes, errors and lapses of mem- 
< ory, have a common cause in the Unconscious, 
and that they are an expression of the wish of 
the Unconscious. Thus if one writes a letter and 
forgets to post it, there is a probability that there 
was in the Unconscious a motive for not posting 
it. Possibly it contained a check in payment of a 
bill. Possibly the check was " inadvertently " left 
out, in which case the letter might be remembered 
and posted. If we " inadvertently " leave any 
of our belongings in the house of a friend the 
supposition is that there is an unconscious wish to 
return soon ostensibly for the purpose of remov- 
ing the articles. If we blunder in shaking hands 
with a new acquaintance, the presumption is that 
our Unconscious sees something in the person that 
it does not like, probably a resemblance to some 
person who has offended us. If we find difficulty 
in meeting an appointment on time, it is likely that 
we have at least an unconscious desire not to meet 
it at all. 

In the psychoanalysis of everyday life one 
whose attention has been called to it may notice 
the sudden occurrence to the mind of words which 
seem to be entirely unconnected with the general 
topic then under consideration. I have an ex- 
ample in my own experience of a word coming in 
that way through the Unconscious and not imme- 
diately perceived. As I sat in a restaurant one 



EVERYDAY LIFE 205 

day my eye wandered about and I suddenly heard 
mentally the word " Pittsburg." I was not con- 
scious at the time of seeing or having seen the 
word printed anywhere. Being familiar with this 
experience, however, I looked purposively at all 
the printed words there visible and soon found 
the word on a bill of fare right before me, which 
of course I must have seen. The word had 
entered my Unconscious by way of the sense of 
sight and had then been pushed up from the 
Unconscious into consciousness by way of the 
sense of mental hearing. On another occasion 
I was sitting at my table writing when my con- 
sciousness became aware of a peculiar odour 
which by reflection was appreciated as being like 
that of ink. I then saw that I had laid my foun- 
tain pen down in such a way that the point of it 
touched the table cover. Some ink had soaked 
out from the pen and had, right before my eyes, 
made a stain about the size of a copper cent on 
the white cloth. In this instance the information 
that I had stained the table cover was conveyed 
first to my Unconscious by way of the sense of 
smell and then to my consciousness by way of a 
mental image of sight. In both these instances 
analysis, which I had not the time in the one 
case or knowledge in the other to accomplish, 
might have shown that there was some idea in my 
Unconscious particularly suited to call up the idea 



206 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

of Pittsburg in the one case and ink in the other. 

Another class of mental phenomena in which 
we see the unconscious element strongly predomi- 
nating is that class of words by neurologists called 
neologisms. I have observed numerous neol- 
ogisms occurring in my own mental states, which, 
however, lack the special character of being ap- 
parently newly coined words. All my so-called 
neologisms except one or two are words occur- 
ring in some language, but they have occurred to 
my mind in the way characteristic of neologisms 
in general, — that is, they have come up in appar- 
ent irrelevance to what I was at the time reading 
or thinking. 

I was reading an encyclopaedia article on Scot- 
tish-Gaelic Literature, when I mentally heard the 
word " marred." I always mentally hear these 
neologisms, as I do all the words I am silently 
reading. Furthermore, there is no articulatory 
movement, innervation or imagery in my silent 
reading. A sentence in the article read: "The 
beginning is marked." One might naturally say I 
had made the mistake of reading " marred " in 
place of " marked," but that was not the case, as 
I did not mentally hear " The beginning was 
marred " or get any such sense out of it, or try to 
harmonise " marred " with anything I was read- 
ing. The auditory image " marred " simply 
appeared unannounced in consciousness, and at- 



EVERYDAY LIFE 207 

tracted my attention (as all the others have done) 
by its apparent irrelevance, producing much the 
same feeling of surprise and annoyance that I 
should have felt if someone had spoken the word 
in a loud voice in a quiet room where I was read- 
ing to myself. The explanation of this neologism 
is, I believe, in the fact that a few hours before 
I had cut the first finger of my right hand. This 
damaging of the first is ideationally paralleled in 
the words " The beginning is marred " and the 
formation of neologisms is illustrated by the fact 
that letters are taken from any number of words 
on different lines and combined below the level of 
consciousness, and delivered already assembled. 
This neologism is manifestly determined at least 
doubly (it is of course impossible to tell how 
manifold are the determinations that have escaped 
my attention). There is the visual " mar 4- ed " 
in the word " marked," and there is an " r " in 
the line below, completing the conventional spell- 
ing of the word; secondly, there is the idea of 
the beginning or first and the first finger. I can 
only believe that my mind was " set " to read 
" marred " or any appropriate anagram in the 
first printed page that caught my eye, as my finger 
was aching and had two bad cuts in it, and I 
thought it was seriously damaged. 

An illustration of the multiple determination of 
the neologism, as indeed of every manifestation 



208 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

of the Unconscious, is the word " coffin " which I 
mentally heard as I glanced at the following 
cyclopaedia article : 

HANIFAH, ha-ne'fa, or ABTT-HANIFAH (702- 
72). One of the four great Mohammedan Imams 
or Church fathers. He was born at Kufa on the 
Euphrates, and became founder of the Hanifites, 
the oldest of the sects of Mohammedans considered 
orthodox. His teachings were subsequently formu- 
lated into a code of Mohammedan law, which is 
still in force in many parts of the Ottoman Empire. 
He died in prison at Bagdad, where he had been 
placed for contumacy in refusing the office of Kadi, 
offered him by the Caliph, and declined because he 
thought himself unworthy of it. 

It contains the letters of the word " coffin " at 
least five times and " box " once, not to mention 
the word " Kufa," which sounds something like 
" coffin." 

A meeting of high-school teachers in a large 
city was addressed by a professor from a neigh- 
bouring college on the opportunities of their par- 
ticular subject, which for illustration we shall call 
Latin. After a brief period introductory of his 
theme, he showed that he was getting warmed up 
to his subject by the following remark: "It is 
your duty to inspire your teachers," and hastily 
correcting himself he said " pupils." Why did 
this mistake occur? It is quite likely that he was 
thinking that it was his duty to inspire the teachers 



EVERYDAY LIFE 209 

who were present, following the traditional pater- 
nalistic trend that paralyses our modern European 
society brought over on the Mayflower, which 
implies that the teachers were to be regarded as 
finished and finite clods untroubled by a spark, 
and that the spark was to be supplied by the col- 
lege professor. He felt that he had to inspire 
the teachers, because in his exalted position he had 
something to hand down to the assembled high- 
school teachers, who were grubbing along in fur- 
rows where later seeds were to be sown by the 
seminaries of the colleges and universities. His 
mind was so full of the duty that he himself had 
to perform that it cropped out in the slip of the 
tongue that I have recorded. He was evidently 
thinking of his self-imposed task of inspiring the 
teachers. 

I stood on the corner of the street on which 
the post office is situated. At the time there ap- 
peared no reason why I should have paused there. 
When I got home I found I was out of stamps. 

The impression of something forgotten is quite 
familiar. There usually is something forgotten. 
A man got into his automobile, and went to his 
home a distance of nine miles. When his door 
was opened by his expectant wife, he suddenly 
was aware of having forgotten something, but he 
could not think what it was. His wife's first 
words were : " Why, where is Jennie? " He had 



210 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

forgotten his own daughter, whom he was to call 
for in the town he had just come from, and take 
home with him. , 

In the case of the pausing at the corner of the 
post office street, I could have perhaps recollected 
what was lacking if I had been at the time awake to 
the fact that there is always a practical reason for 
such apparently unaccountable actions. But the 
fact was that I did not fully realise that I had 
hesitated until later and then the post office was 
out of sight and so out of mind. 

In the case of the man who had forgotten to 
take his daughter home with him, we should have 
to make a more extended analysis before we should 
be able to tell just why at that particular time he 
wished to forget his daughter. 

On many occasions the Unconscious gives evi- 
dences of an ability to help in indirect ways in 
the ordinary details of daily occupation. I was 
sitting at my desk, and after finishing a letter 
opened a drawer to get a stamp. The stamp book 
was not in the drawer. So I put the letter in the 
envelope, addressed it and laid it aside, with the 
thought that the stamp book would turn up. This 
very thought is a slight indication that my Un- 
conscious was operating with a view of showing 
me where the stamp book was. I had mislaid it, 
and I knew that consciously to search for it would 
generally prove useless and waste time, so I pro- 



EVERYDAY LIFE 211 

ceeded with my correspondence. In a few minutes 
something impelled me to move certain objects 
at the back of the desk. As I lifted a tray con- 
taining pencils, the stamp book was revealed. 

On one occasion when I was very busy and un- 
willing to be interrupted, I was asked by someone 
for an article which I did not have and did not 
know where it could be found. After looking in 
one or two places for it, I said it might be found 
downstairs and I ushered the gentleman out of 
my room, saying, " Going downstairs is the best 
thing I can avoid you," meaning " advise you to 
do." My Unconscious had a very slight effort 
to make, to change the word advise into the word 
avoid, after so far influencing me as to make me 
suggest to the gentleman that he go downstairs, 
which if I had thought twice about my form of 
expression I should have probably refrained from 
mentioning. 

A teacher kept a boy after school to punish 
him for talking at an inopportune time. The 
boy said that if he stayed he would lose his train. 
Teacher said that if he had wished to get away 
on time he should have behaved better. The boy 
again said he must go at once and catch his train, 
as he had to do some work at home. The teacher 
paid no attention and the boy continued for a 
period of five to ten minutes to repeat that he 
must get home and that he needed to do work 



212 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

when he got there. The teacher then said he did 
not believe the boy, and the boy then got very hot 
and said he could prove it. The teacher then said 
that the more the boy averred, the less would 
anyone believe, because they would think that the 
boy felt he needed much asseveration in order to 
create a belief. After the discussion the teacher 
walked home, leaving the boy in the school guard- 
room, and reflected as he did so that a curious 
feature of his mild state of excitement was the 
use of numbers in the following sentence with 
which he had sought to impress the boy : " If you 
say a thing once, perhaps people will believe you ; 
if you say it twice, they will begin to disbelieve 
you; if you say it three times, they will believe 
you still less," etc. The teacher on analysing this 
climax-like sentence structure from the psycho- 
analytic point of view had the idea suddenly pre- 
sented to him that he was in reality working him- 
self up to a pitch of excitement by means of those 
very numbers, once, twice, and remembering that 
all excitement is fundamentally one, and that one 
is designed by nature to increase in intensity to 
an acme of pleasure, and then to cease by virtue 
of having spent itself, he suddenly awoke to the 
trick that his Unconscious had played upon him. 

An example of symptomatic actions was ob- 
served in the case of a man who had recently 
become possessed of what was to him a consider- 



EVERYDAY LIFE 213 

able sum of money. This instance is the more 
remarkable from the fact that he had frequently 
noticed that tradespeople gave him too much 
change. The analysis of why tradespeople do 
that had occupied him somewhat. He had won- 
dered whether they intended to give now a 
dime and now a nickel too much in change with 
the idea possibly that it would be noticed by the 
customer and accepted tacitly as a sort of mild 
graft which would be an inducement to continue 
to deal at the same store. On the occasion of 
which I speak, which was the day he had deposited 
quite a good-sized check to his credit in his bank, 
he went across the street to pay his bill at the 
drug store. The amount of it was six dollars and 
forty-five cents. Taking out the forty-five cents, 
as he supposed, he laid it on the counter. He 
would have been willing, if he had been called 
away suddenly, to swear that he had put down 
a quarter and two dimes. The druggist looked at 
it and then at the customer, who wondered why 
he did not take it until he saw that what he had 
laid there was a half-dollar and two dimes. This 
is a good sign that the man in question had un- 
consciously given evidence of a desire to give out 
money, a characteristic that had not been re- 
marked in him before that time. Previous to that 
time he would have been much more likely to give 
out less than the proper amount, by mistake. 



2i 4 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

A man in leaving for his business one morning 
took out of the change pocket of his overcoat his 
elevated railroad ticket, and remarked to his 
wife that he was always careful to buy tickets in 
advance, so as not to have to get them in the 
rush of the morning hour. After he had gone a 
short distance toward the station, he again put 
his hand into his pocket and from the same place 
where he had taken out the ticket to show his 
wife he found the switch key of his automobile, 
which in his conscious moments he had intended 
to leave with his wife so that she might have the 
use of the car that day. We see here a good 
example of a certain type of mental conflict. On 
the one hand he wished his wife to have the 
use of the car, but there had been at one time quite 
an unpleasant feeling connected with the purchase 
of that particular car on the ground that it had 
been an unnecessary expense, so that it is as- 
sumed that there was still in the Unconscious a 
wish that she should not have the use of it, a wish 
which made him utterly oblivious of the fact that 
he had the key in his pocket, must have touched it 
indeed, when he was making the utterly uncalled 
for display of his foresight and his ticket. 

No more impressive testimony of the inevita- 
bility of our thought processes has been given 
anywhere in the history of philosophy than that 
offered by the psychoanalysts in the matter of 



EVERYDAY LIFE 215 

random numbers. Think of any number you 
please, — 41, 153, or any other, — and a thorough 
analysis will show that you could not have thought 
of any other number at that time, and moreover 
will show you just why you happened to think at 
the time of that particular number. Take, for 
example, the instance given by Kaplan ( Grundzilge 
der Psychoanalyse, p. 15). " One man is telling 
another how to use the telephone. ' You ring up 
central and say, Main, 9871/ The number is an 
imaginary one. The man has never had to call up 
such a number. Why did he happen to think of 
this number?" The explanation is as follows: 
The girl he is in love with lives at No. 9 in a 
certain street. He had frequently imagined how 
pleasant it would be if he could live in the next 
house, which would be No. 7. The fact that this 
number and not n, the number of the house next 
door on the other side, was chosen is explained by 
the fact that the girl has recently moved into a 
house the number of which has a 7 in it. The 
presence of the figure 8 in the imaginary number 
is explained on the ground that the girl was not 
one who could be treated with any suddenness, 
and so a gradual transition from 7 to 9 had to be 
imagined. Thus the number 8 was indispensable. 
And finally 1 is accounted for on the ground that 
the man in question wished to be number one in his 
own home that he had created in his fancy. The 



216 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

numbers, then, that make up the imaginary tele- 
phone call are each one closely associated with 
the person through a strong interest; hence they 
are the first to occur. Consequently everyone in 
calling up a random number will be governed by 
the same personal interests and the number will 
be furnished ready made by the Unconscious. 
The ease with which anyone can call off imaginary 
numbers is well known. 

Doing two things at once is one of the most im- 
portant symptomatic actions in which so many 
people persist. Now it appears that in doing two 
things at once we are splitting our psyche. I re- 
ferred in an earlier section to the distraction of 
talking with someone while playing the piano. 
If I attempt to carry on a conversation with an- 
other person while I am playing on the piano I 
am giving up a part of my attention to the music 
and a part to the conversation. The splitting in 
this case may be more or less harmful according 
to my skill at the instrument. If I am a very 
skilled player I may be able to let my hands wan- 
der over the keyboard and give the greater amount 
of attention to the conversation, because the play- 
ing has become automatic with me and does not 
need my entire attention. But if this is so, I am 
gaining nothing by continuing to play, and I would 
in all cases be much wiser to give my entire atten- 
tion to the conversation. This is not merely say- 



■ 



EVERYDAY LIFE 217 

ing again the good old adage about doing one 
thing at a time, or that what is worth doing at all 
is worth doing well, because it is really possible 
from the point of view of psychoanalysis to say 
more than that. Not only is what is worth doing 
at all worth doing well, but any inferiority of 
performance resulting from my not doing a thing 
as well as I can — that is, with all the attention 
that I can possibly give it — is in effect allowing 
some section of my ego to function apart from 
some other section. It would be well for each one 
of us to examine as carefully as possible his own 
actions with regard to this very detail. Are we, 
while doing one thing physically, such as climbing 
an elevated stairway, either mentally or physically 
taking the change out of our pocket or purse to 
pay for the ticket? If we are we are not devoting 
all the psyche unitedly to its task, which was climb- 
ing the stairway, and a division takes place, which 
only needs to be carried further and become more 
ingrained in the mental system to produce symp- 
toms very similar to dementia-precox, a mental 
disease which is also called schizophrenia (from 
the Greek schizo, I split, and phren, the mind). 
Do we not devote our entire attention to the 
specific task we have before us, and do we try 
to overreach toward the next task or toward the 
next reward? Do you read the newspaper while 
you are eating your breakfast ? Or while driving 



218 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

your motor car? It will of course be objected 
immediately that one of these is very easy to do, 
while the other is a practical impossibility. But 
every act of ours all day long may be measured 
upon this scale of greater or less splitting of the 
attention and we shall find out that in some things 
we are doing it more and in some things less, and 
further it will be evident that the more we thus 
split ourselves the less are we accomplishing. 
This is in spite of the fact that we think we are 
accomplishing more when we do two things at 
once. The story of Julius Caesar being able to 
dictate several letters at once, and the fact that 
chess players can play so many games at the same 
time blindfolded may (or may not) be examples 
of this psychic splitting. We do not know how 
much splitting there is in these cases, because we 
do not know how complete may be the devotion of 
attention to each letter separately or to each game 
separately. A complete switching off of the atten- 
tion from one game, to centre it for the next few 
minutes solely upon another, is not a real split- 
ting of the attention. It is rather a succession of 
strong concentrations. But when with a book in 
hand we pretend to be reading and allow our 
minds to wander to other subjects, or when in per- 
forming the work incident to one occupation we 
are from time to time letting our thoughts go to 
extraneous subjects, we are doing what is de- 



EVERYDAY LIFE 219 

scribed in another part of this book as mani- 
festing a moral conflict. What we do, we ought 
so fully to approve of consciously that we are 
gratified to devote all our energies for the time 
to that one pursuit to the utter exclusion of every 
other thought. The performance of any duty in 
a half-hearted way is an unmistakable sympto- 
matic action. It shows at once that the doer of it 
is not at one with himself. But in psychoanalytic 
language this state is expressed by saying that the 
craving for life, for love and for activity is being 
dissipated, that the unconscious forces are not 
enlisted on the side of the person so acting and 
that they are, therefore, as it were, on the other 
side, and the psyche is from this point of view 
like two horses that are pulling in opposite direc- 
tions, and not succeeding in making progress in 
any direction. 



CHAPTER XI 

PSYCHOTHERAPY 

A. The Moral Struggle 

A conflict arises in the psyche between the crav- 
ings of the Unconscious and the restrictions put 
upon those cravings by the conventions of society, 
represented as these restrictions are by the power 
called the censor or the endopsychic censor. And 
as the conflict is between the organising force of 
society on the one hand and the disorganising 
force of the Titan, on the other hand, it is a moral 
conflict. The effects of this conflict are shown in 
the physical condition of the person in whose psyche 
the conflict takes place. Thus, to take a concrete 
illustration, a man for certain reasons begins to 
hate his wife, and, unconsciously at any rate, de- 
sires to leave her. The conventions of present- 
day society as he knows them prevent him from 
leaving her outright, but a compromise is effected. 
He leaves her symbolically. Many men do this 
by having as little to do with their wives as pos- 
sible. They see them and speak to them as infre- 
quently as possible, stay away from home as much 

220 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 221 

as possible, and when they are forced by circum- 
stances to go home they pay as little attention to 
them as they can. One man I have seen never 
spoke to his wife even at table, but in every way 
completely ignored her. These are, however, con- 
scious acts and the conflict that they represent is 
carried on in the open and is fully known to both 
parties. But the conflict that goes on in the Un- 
conscious, instead of expressing itself in the wife- 
hating man in petty meannesses such as I have 
mentioned, takes the form of some kind of physical 
ill, or, as it is expressed in psychoanalytic language, 
becomes subject to Conversion. The feelings in- 
stead of being let out in overt acts of spite and 
hatred, are bottled up, so to speak, and are con- 
verted into internal injuries. We see thus the out- 
working of the moral conflict. When the man 
expresses his hate in open acts he hands the dam- 
age over to the object of his hate and suffers 
none of the damage himself, except what comes to 
him indirectly, through not having things go 
smoothly in his home. He is in a sense egotistic in 
so doing, for he might have been altruistic in this 
sense. He might have kept the physical injuries 
for himself, and preserved his mate. And in the 
concrete illustration of which I spoke at the begin- 
ning of this paragraph, the man actually did keep 
his physical injury to himself. He did it uncon- 
sciously, to be sure, and from that point of view it 



222 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

is hard to ascribe any great degree of merit to his 
specific act. He became blind. He accepted a 
symbolical separation from his wife in place of a 
real one. The effect of the conflict between his 
desire to be rid of his wife and the requirements 
of the community in which he was living, forced 
him, according to his understanding of those re- 
quirements, to keep on living with his wife. He 
made a compromise with society however, uncon- 
scious though it was. He was to continue to live 
with his wife as society demanded, but in compli- 
ance with his own demands he was not to live 
with her. He would live with her as far as hear- 
ing went and the other senses, but he would not 
live with her visually. The only way that can be 
done is for him to become blind. And his blind- 
ness was a purely psychical one. Doctors ex- 
amined him and found nothing the matter with his 
eyes, but the fact remained that he could not see. 
In order to blind himself to his wife he had 
blinded himself to everything. Regarded as a 
moral struggle this case will be seen to be altruistic, 
while the man who simply cuts his wife dead 
(metaphorically) is seen to be the selfish one, and 
the man who suffered blindness rather than do 
actual physical harm is the self-sacrificing one. 
Now, can it always be said that the people who 
show out their feelings, and work them out on 
other people, are the ones who have solved their 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 223 

moral problems correctly because they have 
reached their solution without injuring themselves ? 
Can it, on the other hand, be said that those who 
have solved their problems by swallowing all their 
difficulties, and saved other persons from being 
troubled by them, are the ones that have solved 
their moral problems correctly? There seems to 
be no possible doubt that the persons who pass 
over their ills to others are not doing what is 
right. Psychoanalysis has proved, at any rate, 
that nature endeavours to make man altruistic by 
forcing him unconsciously to keep to himself the 
ills that he might pass on to others of his environ- 
ment. This is shown by the high proportion of 
ills of this kind among peoples of the higher 
civilisations. It seems quite evident that the more 
highly organised any society is, the more numerous 
are the persons in it who carry out their moral 
struggles in their own souls, and so prevent the 
damage that might be done by bringing them out 
into the gaze of their neighbours. In other 
words, the more highly civilised the more neurotics 
there are. The more the mental side of the psyche 
is developed the more are the people who solve 
their moral problems mentally. And this seems 
quite as it should be, because moral problems are 
not physical ones. Moral problems must be 
solved in the intellect. 

The striking feature of this contrast between 



224 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

the archaic uncivilised trends in the Unconscious 
and the continual working of society upon the 
individual, is the high ethical standpoint which it 
is necessary to take in viewing all the conflicts 
that arise. In the censor we have in us a repre- 
sentative of the restraining, directing force which 
society exerts upon us. It needs but a glance at 
the origin of the word moral to see that, as it is 
derived from the Latin mos, moris, which means 
custom, the central idea of the word has been that 
acts that are of such a nature that they could be- 
come customary for all persons without detriment 
to any, are the only acts that could really be called 
moral. This implies that these acts must be such 
as to further the progress of society as an organ- 
ised system, and shows that nothing that we can 
think or do fails to be censored, so to speak, by 
that representative within us of the spirit of social 
evolution which alone makes for progress. So 
that we see that every conflict between the con- 
scious life which is the directed thinking, and the 
unconscious life which is the so-called phantasy- 
ing, is really an ethical struggle. This means that 
any lack of adjustment to our environment which 
shows itself in peculiarities of behaviour, of what- 
ever nature these peculiarities may be, is the result 
of the opposition set up by the Unconscious toward 
the restraints of society. This opposition is de- 
scribed as a conflict between two opposing wishes. 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 225 

The simplest illustration of it is the situation men- 
tioned by Holt.* " Wishes conflict when they 
would lead the body into opposed lines of conduct, 
for it is clear that the body cannot at the same 
time, say, lie abed and yet be hurrying to catch 
a train; and this is the source of conflict in all 
cases, even those where the actual physical inter- 
ference is too subtle to be detected." 

The detection of the actual physical interfer- 
ence is exactly what Freud and his school have 
been most successful in doing, and they have shown 
in great detail in some instances where and how 
the physical interference takes the form, not only 
of a mental disturbance, so great as to make the 
sufferer, who is the battle ground of the conflict, 
unable to continue to do his work in society, but, 
what seems to the ordinary person so utterly far- 
fetched, they have attempted to show how the 
moral conflict has become manifest in a physical 
defect. Pfister tells of a girl who suffered from 
swollen lips. The swelling was an expression of 
the moral question as to the propriety of the girl 
in allowing herself to be kissed by a certain man. 
Even the thought of this action, which, in her 
heart the girl disapproved, was enough to cause 
the lips to swell. Does that seem ridiculous? It 
is no more unlikely than that she should have 
blushed. If blushing is a reaction of a purely 

* The Freudian Wish, p. 5. 



226 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

physical nature to a purely mental stimulus, why 
should we not admit the possibility of a rush of 
blood to the lips, just as readily as we admit the 
possibility of a rush of blood to the cheeks, as a 
result of a moral struggle? Is not every blush 
a sign of a moral conflict? If this purely physical 
condition is always caused by purely mental states, 
is it not quite likely that other changes in circula- 
tion, in other parts of the body, may be caused by 
conditions quite as exclusively mental as this 
change? And if we can see this interplay of 
mental and physical before our very eyes in the 
act of blushing, have we any right to doubt that 
a similar interplay of physical and mental may take 
place in parts of the body that we cannot see? If 
the act of blushing is so clearly a case of mind 
influencing body because it is so instantaneous, is 
it not conceivable that there is also a much more 
slow and subtle influence being exerted continu- 
ously upon our bodies by our minds? A woman 
relative of Goethe was noticed by that keen ob- 
server to have an attack of eczema on her neck and 
breast whenever she was required to put on a de- 
collete costume. It is as if she had reasoned uncon- 
sciously that it was not moral, in a broad sense, to 
expose that part of her body and that if she had 
an attack of eczema, either she would not be 
obliged to do so, or that her sin would be less if 
she presented to the world a less attractive epi- 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 227 

dermis. It matters not at all whether she was 
correct in her reasoning, for in the realm of the 
interplay of mental and physical strange fallacies 
are found. It would be enough that she thought 
her action was improper. The ethical conflict 
takes place between the opposing thoughts of the 
person. What the thoughts are is determined by 
the bringing up of the person. 

Another instance of the effect of the mind on 
the body, showing again the moral struggle, is the 
case of the man who was suffering from an at- 
tack of exophthalmic goitre. He was a doctor, 
but that fact is not so very remarkable, after all, 
considering that the majority of doctors still think 
the mind has very little effect upon the body in 
causing disease. An analyst asked the doctor in 
question abruptly how much money he had lost. 
The doctor had lost four thousand dollars, a loss 
of which the analyst could not possibly have been 
aware. What can be the connection between ex- 
ophthalmic goitre and the loss of money? In the 
present state of psychoanalytic knowledge it is im- 
possible to answer this question definitely, except 
to say that a connection has been observed be- 
tween the activities of the thyroid gland, which 
are in this disease always increased, and the men- 
tal state with regard to the financial question as 
affecting the sufferer. 

I have given here three illustrations of the 



228 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

• 

effect of mind over body, two of them concerned 
in the causation of disease. The doctors in gen- 
eral will doubt the mental causation of the eczema, 
and will ridicule the idea that a moral struggle has 
anything to do with the activities of the thyroid 
gland. Possibly even the unprejudiced reader may 
be sceptical about the morality or immorality of 
contracting any disease. But the doctors tell us 
we should not worry, that worry and strain pro- 
duce or at any rate favour the hardening of the 
arteries, and though they admit that there may be 
a contributing cause from the mental side, they 
have as a rule left that side uninvestigated. It is 
the merit of the Freudian psychoanalysts that they 
have given this question their undivided attention 
for a quarter of a century and that they are in a 
position to offer some real facts as a result of 
their investigations. Their results have for the 
most part been ignored by physicians and by non- 
medical people alike for two reasons. In the first 
place the connections between disease and men- 
tality are so complicated that it requires an ex- 
tremely refined technique to trace them out, impos- 
sible for the ordinary person not acquainted with 
the description of the different diseases, and the 
details of their symptoms. This elaborate tech- 
nique, which would be almost impossible for the 
non-medical person, is difficult for the physician, 
because of the great amount of time necessary to 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 229 

acquaint himself with the principles of psycho- 
analysis, as applied to the cure of certain diseases. 
Most physicians now having a good practice of 
their own have not that amount of time at their 
disposal. In the second place the results of the 
investigations of the Freudian school have been 
ignored both by patient and by physician for the 
very reason stated at the beginning of this book, — 
namely, that the cause of a good proportion not 
only of the mental but also of the physical dis- 
orders which humanity suffers is a struggle be- 
tween conventional morality, used here in the 
sense of social ethical behaviour, and the in- 
stincts and impulses which are continually being 
sent up to us from the Unconscious, from the 
archaic representative in us of the aeons of evolu- 
tion through which we have passed in our descent 
from our primate and cave-man ancestors. This 
moral struggle, the conflict which is the most 
closely connected with our most intimate nature, 
where morality and immorality most closely touch 
us, naturally centres about our sexual life. This 
is the reason why there has been developed so 
great a resistance toward the Freudian theories. 
What more likely than that man should be unwill- 
ing to have his sexual life minutely examined, and 
be told that its unconscious abnormalities are the 
cause of a good part of his ills. Humanity would 
much prefer to have the ills continue than to be 



230 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

cured in this fashion. It requires a great, an almost 
impossible amount of fortitude for any one of us 
to submit to this mental surgery. We instinctively 
shrink from the circumstances of a physical surgi- 
cal operation, the fasting, the anaesthetic — I need 
not particularise further! Quite as instinctively 
do we shrink from the analogous preparations for 
the psychical surgery, in which we submit, so to 
speak, to an operation which unfolds the secret 
springs of our being. And yet the time is not 
very far distant when the general medical practi- 
tioner will say to his patient : " I am unable to 
find anything serious the matter with your heart or 
your lungs or your kidneys. It is true, your health 
is not good. You are certainly not able to carry 
on your business." To this, formerly, he would 
have added that perhaps a change for the better 
might follow a trip south or north or east or west, 
or a complete rest might be a benefit. This trip or 
this rest, however, is not always convenient or 
possible, and its mental effect on some people is 
anything but reassuring. I have seen the despair 
of persons who have been told to go to a different 
climate in order to cure themselves of tuberculosis. 
But in time to come and not far distant the medi- 
cal adviser, on finding a patient without good 
health, but with all the material for producing 
good health, viz. : good physique and no serious 
organic defect, will say to his patient: " What you 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 231 

need is to be analysed. Go to Dr. Blank, and I 
think he will be able to help you." This piece of 
advice will be all the more acceptable to this pa- 
tient because in going to Dr. Blank he will not 
have to leave his business to take care of itself. 
This is because the prime object of psychoanalysis 
is to make the.patient capable not only of the work 
that he has been doing in society but, in the end, 
more of the same work. In other words, it seeks 
to develop the power of the individual to increase 
his activities rather than to diminish them. This 
development can generally be best carried out in 
the environment in which the patient found him- 
self incapacitated. It is again a case of moral con- 
flict. The man or the woman has literally become 
sick of the work they were doing and it is the 
task of the psychoanalyst to discover the reasons 
for the moral struggle and enable the patient to 
take up the work he has found so pathogenic and 
do it (and more too), right in the same place, if 
possible. Persons who are directed by others in 
such a way as to have little responsibility and 
therefore little moral struggle are less likely, par- 
ticularly if they are very hard-worked and do 
their work cheerfully and conscientiously, to be so 
detrimentally affected by the ethical conflict. It 
may almost be said — in fact I think I have myself 
heard such persons say — that they have no time 
to be sick. If it is true that worry and not work 



232 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

kills, then it may be as truly said that we are killed 
by our own unemployed energies. That is, in 
fact, just what the newer psychology has taught 
us, and in very definite terms. For the continual 
craving for life, love and activity, which is as 
constant and insistent as the heartbeat and the 
sunlight, never leaves us and like an undirected 
stream of water does damage where if directed it 
might water a garden or put out a fire, or, if great 
enough, run a mill. We must be active all our 
waking hours. Not only that, but we must morally 
approve, not to say outright love, all we do. 
These two requirements insure the presence of 
the thiisd. The activity and the love being present 
make the life full and wholesome, and none of 
the diseases that are engendered by unwholesome 
doubts as to the moral propriety of the acts can 
trouble us. 

If this very schematic statement were adequate 
completely to describe the facts, the whole thing 
would be quite simple. We should then only have 
to review our daily activities, and if we could not 
approve of them with a clear conscience, we should 
change them and do others that we could approve 
of, and all would go well. But it is not so simple 
as that, for the reason that we do not ourselves 
know in some cases what we really do morally ap- 
prove of. The unconscious factor enters here as 
everywhere. We are prone to state one belief 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 233 

and really hold quite a different one in our Uncon- 
scious. That is one of the ways in which the 
Unconscious deceives us. I may instance the be- 
lief held by most men that they are not influenced 
in their choice of a woman to marry by the image 
of their own mother, which has changed for them 
the appearance of every other woman on the face 
of the earth. They think they form independent 
opinions, but they really do not. Similarly they 
think that they morally approve or disapprove of 
a given action when psychoanalysis will show that 
they are saying the opposite of what is really true, 
and have deceived themselves by frequent assev- 
eration. 

It is, then, only through a complete and scientific 
analysis carried out in the manner that has been 
indicated in the chapter on dreams that one can 
really get a true knowledge of what one morally 
believes, and remove the self-deceptions that have 
been accumulating for years. 

B. Reasoning by Analogy 

James, in his Psychology, notes that " some 
people are far more sensitive to resemblances, 
and far more ready to point out wherein they 
consist, than others are. They are the wits, the 
poets, the inventors, the scientific men, the prac- 
tical geniuses. A native talent for perceiving anal- 



234 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

ogies is reckoned by Professor Bain, and by others 
before and after him, as the leading fact in genius 
of every order " (Vol. I, p. 530). The basis of 
all classification is the degree of resemblance in 
the things classified. To classify a man as a mur- 
derer makes us act differently toward him from 
the way we would act if we did not classify him as 
such. The pacifists' greatest argument is the 
classification of war as murder. Everyone acts 
according to his perceptions, and his perceptions 
are nothing but classifications. Errors are wrong 
classifications. In acting erroneously we act as if 
we were faced by one set of circumstances, whereas 
we are confronted with quite another. We have 
classified the circumstances wrongly. A boy went 
out one evening with a newly acquired shotgun to 
amuse himself with it by shooting bats. The first 
thing he shot was a Cecropia moth whose flight 
he mistook for that of a bat. As the motions of 
the two are not very similar, it showed that his 
discrimination was not very fine. In the act of 
classification which this boy performed probably 
in his Unconscious, he saw only the similarity be- 
tween the moth and the bat, and acted as if the 
moth were a bat. He was really quite chagrined 
when he discovered that he had wasted his powder 
and shot on a mere insect. It is quite the same 
with all of us. Our actions from minute to min- 
ute are reactions to our environment which we are 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 235 

continuously classifying. This daily activity of 
ours proceeds upon the principle that we have 
evolved classes of actions which we perform as 
reactions to certain classes of circumstances. This 
evolving of a classification of all the circumstances 
in which we have found ourselves is the every- 
day philosophy which we have developed for the 
guidance of our lives. It is true that this philos- 
ophy may never have been consciously evolved 
and therefore is not really entitled to be called a 
true philosophy of life, which should be the con- 
scious thinking out of all our behaviour. The 
best equipped people for the competition of life 
are those who have made up their minds exactly 
what they are going to do in every emergency. 
The most experienced individuals are those who 
have worked out their classifications of action and 
can be depended upon to react in a uniform man- 
ner to the various incidents of their occupations. 
If a teller in a bank accepts for deposit a bank- 
note which is a counterfeit, he shows by this act 
that he has classified the bill wrongly. Everyone 
reasons all the time, in making these classifications, 
in a manner that is called reasoning by analogy. 
New classifications are always responded to with 
new modes of action. An inability to make a satis- 
factory classification results in disconcerted action, 
whereas the quick diagnosing of an occurrence re- 
sults in a speedy and appropriate course of action. 



236 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

In an epidemic of infantile paralysis, for instance, 
people will act according as they believe the dis- 
ease contagious or not. If I classify it in my own 
mind as contagious I will avoid contact with the 
persons whom I suspect of having it. In all this 
classification, and indeed in every other kind, 
which means in every act of my waking life, I am 
controlled in my actions by the principle of rea- 
soning by analogy. Even in the syllogisms of 
formal logic, we are at the mercy of this analogi- 
cal reasoning in the selection of the propositions 
which we are to use as our major and our minor 
premises. Upon the correct classification of the 
concepts used in the propositions depends not of 
course the formal validity but the actual value of 
the conclusion. And it is the actual value of the 
conclusion that is to govern us in our actions. 
Thus it is plain that in our conscious life the really 
dynamic results of our thinking, — namely, our 
acts, — which make or mar ourselves and our 
neighbours, are all caused by the faculty which 
we have of seeing resemblances. If in our walk of 
life we do not see the resemblance of certain cir- 
cumstances to dangerous ones that we have previ- 
ously experienced, or heard of or seen others fall 
into, we may ourselves fall into a ditch, meta- 
phorically speaking, from which it may cause us 
no little trouble and expense to extricate ourselves. 
Now, if it is plain that in every act of our daily 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 237 

life we are governed by our feeling of the analogy 
between experiences, based upon their resem- 
blances, which resemblances enable us to classify 
each factor of our environment in turn and act in 
accordance with such classification, it is a necessary 
corollary of this that if we realize that we have 
made a mistake, — that is, a wrong classification, — 
we may correct our mistake the next time that 
such a set of circumstances arises. This is the 
privilege of the conscious activity. If, however, 
we were of such a nature that we had no ability 
to correct our mistakes, which means to reclassify 
that portion of experience to which we have re- 
acted erroneously, and, the next time we met a 
similar emergency, to act in a different manner 
involving less loss and more gain to ourselves, we 
should be in a state worse than most animals, 
which are generally able to profit by their experi- 
ence. Thus our progress in efficiency in dealing 
with the world of reality is made possible by a con- 
scious readjustment. In fact, that is the supreme 
function of consciousness in animate life. But it 
is the conscious part of our psyche which makes 
these readjustments. The necessity for such re- 
adjustments is, according to Bergson, the cause 
of the appearance of consciousness in the evolu- 
tion of the race. 

Now, it has been shown by the newer psychol- 
ogy that this reasoning by analogy is a character- 



238 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

istic feature of the Unconscious Titan within us. 
Just as the origin of consciousness in the evolu- 
tion of man dates somewhere back aeons ago from 
the time when a new adjustment to environ- 
ment was necessary and marks an advance 
in evolution far greater in its effects than 
anything that had gone before it, so this recog- 
nition that reasoning by analogy is a characteristic 
of the Unconscious, and that the conscious read- 
justment to environment is the strongest factor 
in present-day social evolution, is a step in advance 
greater than any step that has been taken since the 
intervention of consciousness in the unconscious 
life of the early stages of evolution. The Un- 
conscious is reasoning by analogy all the time, if it 
can be said to reason at all, and just because it is 
unconscious it is unable to make the necessary cor- 
rections and readjustments which would lead it 
into a closer connection with social evolution 
which is of course a higher form of evolution than 
the merely physical. 

This uncorrected reasoning by analogy is at 
the bottom of the symbolisms that we find in the 
Unconscious and is the cause of the conversion of 
the moral struggle from the sphere of the purely 
mental to that of the physical, as is seen in the 
symptoms of certain diseases. Take, for instance, 
the psychic blindness of the man referred to in a 
previous paragraph. The Unconscious acts on the 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 239 

analogy, on the one hand, between death and dis- 
appearance and, on the other hand, on that be- 
tween disappearance and invisibility. The hated 
wife's not being seen is analogous to her not being 
perceptible to any other sense, which is quite 
analogous to her not existing at all. Freud calls 
attention to the fact that a child's idea of death is 
merely an idea of disappearance, and that when 
a child's dreams show a wish for the death of a 
parent of the opposite sex it signifies no more than 
that the child unconsciously wishes for the dis- 
appearance of the parent. 

A loss of voice on the part of one patient was 
observed to be coincident with the absence of her 
lover. During these absences she was able to 
write a comparatively good letter. It is inferred 
that the Unconscious of the girl, reasoning by 
analogy, took the inability to speak with her lover 
(on account of his absence in another town, pre- 
sumably out of reach of telephone connection) as 
similar to the inability to speak at all. Further- 
more, her ability to write to him was extended, 
still on the principle of analogy to an ability to 
write other things, or at any rate to write them 
better than when he was within speaking distance. 
Another case of psychic blindness, reported by 
Coriat {The Meaning of Dreams, p. 173), in 
the case of a little girl, was upon analysis found 
to rest upon an analogy, the basis of similarity 



2 4 o MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

being the following thoughts. She did not want 
to have any care of her younger brothers and sis- 
ters. She knew that if she were blind she could 
not see to do various things for them, etc. In 
other words, blindness is like inability, which is in 
turn like irresponsibility. She did not wish to be 
responsible for the family nor to do for them, a 
state of mind quite natural in some children, and 
lier moral nature had not accepted the principle of 
self-sacrifice. The very interesting point about 
her case in this connection is that the method fol- 
lowed to produce a cure was also based on the 
reasoning by analogy. The thoughts presented to 
her which changed her classifications and her point 
of view were that seeing is like the return to life 
of her playing with her schoolmates, a return of 
her sight is like a return of her playmates who 
were to her during her blindness like persons that 
had left her life. Regaining her sight was like 
regaining a part of her own life, i.e. her happy 
times in play with her companions. 

We get from this the conclusion that just as in 
conscious life we classify, by means of analogy, — 
that is, similarities, — a set of circumstances as a 
situation in which we generally act in a certain 
manner and we act as if it were such a situation, 
so does the Unconscious in a certain situation 
respond as if it were in the situation in which it 
has classified itself as being. But as the Un- 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 241 

conscious in its methods of classification of experi- 
ences is acting without the light of the conscious 
reason, and as its categories are few and simple, 
the result of this mode of unconscious thought, 
which is hardly to be compared to conscious rea- 
soning because of its lack of fine discriminations 
which characterise conscious reasoning only, is a 
result which appears to conscious reasoning when 
it is viewed by the latter as a very crude and 
illogical process. In the actions of the mother 
toward the child the male Unconscious dimly 
glimpses something that satisfies in early infancy 
all its cravings, in childhood most of them, and 
in manhood many of them. What more natural, 
then, than that when the man comes to pick out 
a wife, he should, in acceptance of the aged dictum 
that love is blind, resign his destiny to fate, which 
in the matter of selection is the Unconscious, and 
that the Unconscious should with coarse discrimi- 
nation feel: "This woman is like the woman 
from whom I used to receive so many comforts, 
this woman is the woman from whom I received 
so many comforts. This is the woman for me "? 
And it does not seem to matter in what particular 
the woman chosen to be life mate resembles the 
mother. It may be but the tone of a voice or the 
turn of a nose, the shape of a hand or a mild 
complacency toward the world (an easy compli- 
ance with the importunities of mankind is a potent 



242 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

factor common to mother and wife!). It seems 
in some cases that the grounds for perception of 
similarity may be exceedingly few. Reasoning by 
analogy may require only one similar trait. The 
Unconscious reacts, we cannot call it reasoning, 
according to primeval modes of action. Cross- 
ing a street full of automobiles I have felt an 
impulse to run and dodge as huge limousines bore 
down upon me, and I was obliged to recognise in 
the impulse an archaic tendency (often seen in 
children crossing a street full of traffic), a tend- 
ency to run when some large thing approaches. 
To the groping Titan within, the big automobile is 
like a monster animal rushing upon it, and its 
first impulse is to run away. In bathing in the 
surf I have had to teach myself (that is, my Un- 
conscious) to do the opposite of almost everything 
that my instincts prompted me to do. 

Now, if it is clear in what crude modes the un- 
conscious mental processes take place, it will be 
clear also what illogical results are achieved by 
them when the interaction of mind and body is 
involved. It has long been recognised that people 
can make themselves sick by worrying about a 
thing that they ought to do, and Freud has pointed 
out the strong motives that many persons, espe- 
cially women, have for getting sick, — namely, that 
they will receive more attention, and become the 
centre of solicitude on the part of more or less 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 243 

numerous relatives. It is notorious, too, how fre- 
quent are the minor illnesses of persons who are 
prevented by those illnesses from doing the very 
things, such as keeping a social appointment, that 
they truly do not want to do. Everyone admits 
the fact of the disturbance of the digestive func- 
tions due to a sudden mental shock, such as sor- 
row, anger or fear. It is quite as reasonable that 
the interaction of consciousness and the vegetative 
processes by the mediation of the Unconscious 
may also be traced, with the result that we may 
eventually lay some of our physical ills definitely 
to certain modes of conscious thinking. To certain 
modes of unconscious thinking they have already 
been laid by the Freudian school. Their hypoth- 
esis is that hysterias and phobias, with their 
physical manifestations, are attributable to a con- 
flict between the Conscious and the Unconscious, 
and it is evident now just what that conflict con- 
sists in. The Unconscious classifies in its rough 
way all desires of its own as legitimate, in so far 
as we may speak of legitimate or its opposite in 
connection with the Unconscious, while the more 
complicated perception of the conscious mind 
classifies some of these desires as unlawful. 



244 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

C. Psychic Gravitation 

We then have in our psyche the situation already 
mentioned from Holt as typified by the fact that 
we cannot lie in bed and at the same time be hurry- 
ing to catch a train. The conscious part of the 
mind, which is so many ages in advance of the 
unconscious in all the refinements of modern 
social organisation, puts restrictions upon the 
primal desires that are continually pushing up 
from the depths, and in every act of ours that is 
not helpful to the cause of social evolution we 
are repeating the situation which is symbolised by 
the conflict between lying in bed and hurrying to 
catch a train. Our conscious life, a type of activity, 
urges us to get up and go about our business, but 
the archaic, infantile Unconscious attempts to 
drag us down again to the level of the infant in the 
cradle. It is so much easier to lie in bed. The 
world of reality outdoors in the fields and in the 
markets, the offices and the shops, contains so 
much that requires a sacrifice of what has been the 
primary source of our earliest and strongest grati- 
fication, the feeling of omnipotence which we had 
as infants when all our needs were supplied with- 
out any effort on our part. 

It is necessary to emphasise this reluctance of 
the craving for life, love and action to face the 
outside world, for it is shown by psychoanalytic 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 245 

research that it is so strong that it might be called 
the psychic law of gravitation. The craving for 
action is not excepted in this general statement, 
for the craving for action is not primarily a crav- 
ing to act upon the world but upon ourselves. Our 
first actions have ourselves for their objects and a 
heightening of pleasure for their result, and so in- 
fantile is the Unconscious that even in people 
who seem to get satisfaction from a work that ef- 
fects changes upon the outside world, it may be 
shown that the changes made upon themselves in 
the way of increasing their capacity for pleasure 
are really sought in the desire for big broad 
physical actions much more than any effect upon 
the world itself. The archaic quality of the un- 
conscious craving does not in every case require 
the presence of a physical means of gratifica- 
tion so archaic that it is impossible of attain- 
ment in modern society. The craving for big 
broad modes of physical action can be sated on 
the farm, in the mine, on the sea and in war. 
Hence William James 1 suggestion of the possi- 
bility of a moral substitute for war. In most 
people, too, the craving for activity can be satis- 
fied by substituting mental fatigue, derived from 
close attention, which is quite analogous to physical 
endurance, in the place of physical fatigue, which 
is a state that the Titan craves for the privilege 
it grants him to return to the slumbers of infancy. 



246 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

The psychic law of gravitation is the ever- 
present tendency on the part of the psyche to seek 
the lowest level of its development rather than to 
progress in an upward direction as viewed from 
the standpoint of social organisation. The de- 
velopment of the individual psyche as sketched 
in a previous chapter is, when successfully car- 
ried out, a development in a direction the reverse 
of that which is indicated in the expression 
" psychic gravitation." Successful development of 
the psyche is toward an independent and self- 
sustaining life apart from the source in which the 
individual had its origin. Just as he has, in order 
to become an independent individuality, first to be 
weaned from the breast, and subsequently to leave 
the parental influence, if not the parental home, 
in order to make a home of his own, so his psyche 
has to be trained away from its inherent infan- 
tility. But the psychic gravitation is always pull- 
ing him down toward the nerveless protoplasm 
from which he has slowly and laboriously 
ascended. 

The bearing of this upon the cure of diseases 
may not be so clear to one newly introduced to 
psychoanalysis; but it becomes clearer when it is 
stated that the analysis of all nervous diseases 
discovers the patient arrested at some stage of his 
upward development from the protoplasm, which 
is so carefully protected by nature from the out- 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 247 

side world. And a great many conflicts which are 
discovered by psychoanalysis to be the causes of 
so many ills, both physical and mental, are moral 
conflicts between the duties imposed upon the indi- 
vidual by his environment on the one hand and the 
essential infantility of his desires in the face of 
those duties on the other. As the growth of the 
individual was intended by nature to be upward 
and outward, so the failure of the individual to 
respond to the air and sunshine of his environ- 
ment is a return downward and inward. The un- 
successfully developing human psychical organism 
regresses toward its original state of inactivity 
and protectedness. 

One of the commonest forms that this inactivity 
takes is day-dreaming. This is almost universal 
in children. By means of it they get ideally the 
satisfactions that they are denied really, the satis- 
factions which are called for by the craving of 
their existence. The power of the imagination is 
so great that it almost replaces in satisfaction value 
the gratifications that rightly should come only 
from the effects produced upon the outside world. 
This is where introversion begins. By most peo- 
ple it is not given up until they have met some 
severe rebuffs from the world. Some people never 
give it up, and remain their whole life long at this 
stage of infantility, in which they are satisfied 
not with a real but with an imaginary fulfilment 



248 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

of their wishes. When it is realised what effect 
this failure to objectify their wishes may have on 
their physical systems, due to the minute interplay 
between physical and psychical, it will not be sur- 
prising that a conflict between love and duty 
may have a deleterious effect upon the health both 
of body and of mind. 

So we return again to the position from which 
we started — namely, that the problem of the em- 
ployment of the powers with which we are en- 
dowed by nature is a moral one, set by the finer 
discriminations of the conscious life, and if we 
find that our Unconscious is leading us to take 
our satisfactions out of a mode of activity that is 
not in our case the most productive and the most 
adapted to further the progress of the develop- 
ment of human society, this discrepancy between 
the moral obligation revealed to us by our con- 
scious life and the quality of our performance, as 
also criticised by the same intelligence, forms the 
basis of a conflict in which the physical part of 
our ego is a serious loser. 

The minuteness and the universality of this rela- 
tion between the two aspects of our ego, the mental 
and the physical, is what renders the study of 
psychoanalysis so difficult and so complicated, 
but the researches of scientists both in Europe 
and in this country are making rich contribu- 
tions each year to the solution of this problem, 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 249 

which is the greatest that humanity has had to 
face. 

We have thus approached the question of the 
mental causation of disease from two directions. 
On the one hand we have seen that when the un- 
corrected unconscious mode of thinking, which we 
have likened to a reasoning by analogy, has been 
traced, in the individual under analysis, to its lair in 
the unconscious part of the ego, and has been, as it 
were, caught and brought out into the open air of 
consciousness, the falsity of the implied inference 
has been appreciated by the Unconscious, and the 
physical effects of this intellectual twist have been 
straightened out, by the Unconscious itself. It is 
almost as if the Unconscious were an awkward 
child who had to be shown how to do certain 
things, but a docile child who after being shown 
was willing to follow directions and gain the re- 
ward that was held out to it. It is again much like 
a hose with a powerful stream of water flowing 
through it, which needs only to be aimed in the 
direction where it will do the most good. This is 
what might be called the intellectual side of the 
question. Granted that after these thousands of 
years we have detected the Unconscious in a mode 
of mental action that is antiquated and of no 
more use than many of the implements of the 
stone age, and granted that while we use the 
very same material of which this mode of 



250 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

thinking is made, — namely, the reasoning by 
analogy, — in our everyday life at the present 
time, but with the corrections and directions 
with which conscious formal reasoning has im- 
proved it, we still find that there is another side 
of it which we have not considered. This is the 
moral phase of the question. And the moral 
phase shows that in order to make the most of 
our mental and physical opportunities, we are 
obliged to recognise the existence of, and to sacri- 
fice, the infantility which we see standing in the 
way of our best development in the direction of 
social human adult activity. 

So that on the other hand we have approached 
the question of the mental causation of disease 
from the point of view afforded us by the deeper 
insight into the nature and individual development 
of the psyche. The evolution of social life de- 
mands from each one of us a standard of be- 
haviour toward our environment which may 
be expressed in the words adult and human. 
Psychoanalysis has found that wherever we have 
been subject to a certain class of diseases, we have 
failed to come up to this standard, and indeed 
without knowing it ourselves. In every act of our 
lives we are confronted with a moral problem, 
which may be expressed in the question as to 
whether we have acted our part in the world as 
men and women in every particular. It may be 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 251 

objected here that there are plenty of people in 
the world who when viewed from this standard 
are childish enough in their actions, and yet are 
perfectly healthy. It is almost certain, however, 
that such people have not lived out their full lives, 
and that sooner or later they will inevitably pay 
in one way or another for their ignorance. Up to 
a certain point ignorance is bliss, but beyond that 
point it is not only misery but is very like de- 
pravity. 

If all the results of psychoanalytic research so 
far attained have shown that in every case of a 
large and continually increasing number of dis- 
eases there is a moral factor which is very potent 
in the causation of the disease, and if that moral 
factor is summed up in the words " adult attitude 
toward the world," it is very certain that it is the 
duty of everyone to whom the information comes 
concerning the later findings in the study of the 
human soul to take what steps he can to find out 
just how he measures up according to this new 
standard, information which, however, can be ex- 
actly and fully ascertained only through the study 
of psychoanalysis. But as this study is at present 
the pursuit of comparatively few persons, it will 
for some time to come be impracticable for any 
except those needing such study of themselves on 
account of serious impediments of the mental and 
moral nature, which have gone so far as to make 



252 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

them incapable of doing their proper work in the 
social organisation. 

I have said that psychoanalysis made inferences 
concerning the Unconscious similar to the infer- 
ence made by astronomy about the existence of 
the planet Neptune before the time of telescopes 
strong enough to make the planet visible. The 
simile, if carried further, would imply that a more 
amplified vision would be attained by which the 
unconscious mental processes inferred by psycho- 
analysis would later be made perceptible to con- 
sciousness, just as our modern high-powered tele- 
scopes give us a view of Neptune itself. But the 
fact is that psychoanalysis is itself that high- 
powered instrument, and that the unconscious 
mental processes, thoughts, wishes and feelings 
are continually being brought into conscious per- 
ception by means of this branch of analytic psy- 
chology. This is a part of the therapeutic pro- 
cedure. For example, the unconscious wish for 
the death of a beloved relative when brought into 
consciousness works off in the emotions we then 
experience. Because of this working off of the 
emotions, which were in a certain sense causing a 
sort of psychic colic below the level of conscious- 
ness, the energy connected with these emotions is 
vented on the outside world, to the great advan- 
tage of the mental-bodily system. By the psycho- 
analysts this working off is called abreaction. It 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 253 

might be characterised as the bringing of uncon- 
scious mental material into the orderly percep- 
tions of conscious life, and rearranging them 
according to the philosophy of life of the indi- 
vidual. This will imply either that the individual 
has a reasoned life philosophy or that in the 
process of being analysed he is acquiring one. 

We see, then, that psychoanalysis educates the 
psyche with the direct object of enabling it to co- 
operate with the vegetative functions of the body 
for the purpose of curing disease. Psychotherapy 
in this sense is not merely a mind cure or a form 
of Christian Science. It does not proceed by mere 
affirmation of health or negation of disease. 
What we have pointed out with regard to nega- 
tivism (p. 60) shows that devoting so much 
attention to disease as to encircle it with compre- 
hensive negation is as rational as saying that the 
circumference of a circle has nothing to do with 
its centre because it nowhere touches the centre. 
The Christian Scientists have mentally kept a con- 
stant distance between themselves and disease. 
They have walked around just one point to which 
they are psychologically tied, viz. : the fear of dis- 
ease. In both schools of " mental healing," — the 
positive one which advocates health in general 
terms, and the negative one, which disclaims dis- 
ease, — the morbid condition occupies the centre of 
attention and fills the minds of the adherents of 



254 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

either school with the one concept. Christian Sci- 
ence in so fervently denying the existence of disease 
is really emphasising the fear of it. Psycho- 
analytic therapeutics, far from being the mere 
verbal affirmation or negation of a concept, has 
supplied us with an elaborate theory of the modes 
by which ideas are converted into diseases. 

One of the simplest expressions of this theory 
is the statement that the unconscious phantasy ac- 
quires the greatest independence of vitality when 
split off from the rest of the psyche, in the case of 
people who are not doing enough of the proper 
kind of directed thinking. Directed thinking of 
the right kind is that which is connected with 
and informed by the experience of other people, 
and the patients in these cases are generally those 
who have formed phantasies of their own about 
the different physiological functions. 

" The content of the phantasy may be a theory 
that is possessed by an affect. A girl sixteen 
years old suffered regularly at her menstrual 
period from vomiting. It was found that when 
a child she had believed that children were born 
through the mouth. After enlightenment in this 
particular the symptom immediately ceased ,1 
(Pfister). 

In this girl the symbol, as we have seen in 
Chapter V, D, is an idea having an energic value 
consistent with the analogic reasoning of the Un- 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 255 

conscious Titan, and has produced an effect which 
was inevitable whether the theory was a good one 
or a bad one. When it was shown to her that the 
theory was contrary to that of all the rest of 
humanity she again acted as if the new explanation 
were true, as indeed this time it was. 

Bertschinger tells (Psychoanalytic Review, III, 
p. 176) of several cases of paranoia where ex- 
planations resulted in a new point of view and a 
satisfactory cure. A " paranoid with vivid hal- 
lucinations of hearing and delusions of persecu- 
tion on the part of certain persons who was greatly 
excited and partly confused, declared when he 
began to quiet down that the abusive expressions 
and remarks of his persecutors were probably 
quite harmlessly intended. He believed, however, 
for a long time that a Higher Power had deliv- 
ered him over to them so that he might guess their 
secret meaning. Then he explained his voices, 
which he divided into ' higher voices and lower 
voices ' as ' combinations of thoughts/ still later 
as his ' own inner reflections. 1 Soon after this he 
was discharged as cured. . . . 

" In two cases improvement and cure set in 
immediately upon the uncovering by myself of 
severe, comparatively recent complexes and upon 
psychological attempts at explanation. . . . 

" The second case was that of a typographer, 
thirty-five years old, whose trouble began sub- 



256 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

acutely in 1900. He was then at a printing estab- 
lishment in French Switzerland. He believed 
himself secretly watched, heard everywhere 
1 Dutchman ' or ' dirty Dutchman ' called after 
him, finally came to believe that a special associa- 
tion had been formed for the purpose of persecut- 
ing him. Very secretly he fled to Paris, as he 
assumed that it would be impossible to notify all 
the people of so large a city of his coming. But 
even at the station everyone called ' Dutchman.' 
Despairingly he turned and without stopping fled 

to his brother's house near Sch , went to bed, 

would neither eat, speak nor move, and was 
brought, on October 9, 1906, to the asylum, mute 
and negativistic. On October 12, after long exer- 
tion, I was able to get him to speak. He related 
to me an old fatal love story, and soon another 
sexual complex was also detected. Still somewhat 
distrustful he received my explanation of the 
genesis of his hallucinations, then carried on a 
long conversation with an old paranoid who had 
numerous hallucinations and soon surprised me by 
the communication that through the study of this 
other patient he had convinced himself of the 
origin of hallucinations of hearing and would 
hence be free from them himself. On October 
21 he sought permission to go out, as he wanted 
to test if he had ceased to hear voices even in the 
town. He came back beaming with joy, was dis- 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 257 

charged as cured on October 22, after only four- 
teen days' stay in the asylum, and has remained 
well until the present day." 

Resymbolisation is thus seen to be one of the 
bases of psychoanalytic therapy. It is a natural 
sequel of the theory that a symptom of a disease 
is the symbol of an unconscious wish. Without in- 
quiring how the symbols themselves in Bert- 
schinger's cases were converted from unconscious 
wishes into the hallucination of voices, we see that 
the cure of these cases was mediated by an ex- 
planation in which the occurrence of the voices was 
seen in a different light. The asocial nature of the 
voices was revealed and the correlation was made 
between the patient and society, with which for 
a time he was at odds. The phenomena were re- 
classified, resymbolised. In the morbid state the 
voices symbolised the hostility of society to the 
patients, and progress to the healthy condition was 
mediated if not entirely caused by the reinterpre- 
tation of these symbols, making them symbols of 
another thing, viz. : a purely mental product. It is 
as if the patients reasoned that those voices were 
not really the voices of hostile members of society, 
but merely the fabrications of the imagination. 
As such, of course, they would not have the pain- 
ful result that they might have had if they were 
really the threats of his fellow-men which might 
indeed be carried out. Similarly the girl who 



258 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

vomited at her periods resymbolised her disorder 
after being informed that parturition was not oral, 
and the girl who had swollen lips was made to 
understand that the swelling symbolised an uncon- 
conscious wish of her psyche. 

Bertschinger gives also other cases where pa- 
tients who believed they were pregnant were re- 
lieved of their hallucination by the removal of a 
tooth. They resymbolised in a slightly different 
way, seeking the removal of the tooth as if it were 
the delivery of a child, and departed cured. An- 
other woman was cured of a melancholia after 
she had burned her " certificate of origin." In so 
doing she seems to have symbolised a change, giv- 
ing up one personality together with all the mental 
affliction connected with it. 

Mention has been made in an earlier chapter 
of the feeling of inferiority. One of the German 
psychoanalysts, A. Adler, has a theory that the 
unconsciously perceived inferiority of any organ 
— for instance, the eye — results in an equally un- 
conscious tendency to stimulate and thus develop 
that organ. Thus, some artists have uncon- 
sciously chosen their careers because of a com- 
parative inferiority of their visual apparatus, 
causing a greater activity in visual mentality, and 
a corresponding overestimation of the value of 
visual sensations. Similarly the comparative in- 
feriority of the sense of hearing turns some 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 259 

people unconsciously toward musical performance, 
whether playing or composing. We see this in 
the tendency of some men of small stature to de- 
vote much attention to physical training, and in 
general a leaning of most people to develop the 
weaker side of their character. Bombastic patri- 
otism is thus rightly regarded with suspicion. 
No physically enormous man needs to be espe- 
cially pugnacious, for he unconsciously feels that 
he will not be often attacked. Demosthenes may 
have become an orator because he was originally 
a stammerer. Physicians have studied medicine 
to compensate for a sickly childhood, just as 
men have made fortunes in money to remove 
themselves as far as possible from the penury of 
their youthful days. 

It is quite reasonable, too, to suppose that many 
diseases are compensations for certain circum- 
stances of the environment of the sufferers. Na- 
poleon, whose ambition might justify one in 
calling him the personification of assimilative 
appetite, dies of cancer of the stomach, a child- 
less married woman dies of cancer of the breast, 
some men drink life to the lees and perish pre- 
maturely of uraemic poisoning. 



26o MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

D. The Transference 

In the chapter on dreams mention was made 
incidentally of the change of heart occurring neces- 
sarily in persons who have their dreams analysed 
scientifically. They begin by being sceptical as to 
the value of dreams. In attempting in the pres- 
ence of the analyser to utter thoughts occurring 
in connection with their dreams they meet with 
frequent stoppages in their thoughts. It seems 
to them that the ideas unexpectedly occurring dur- 
ing the hours with the analyst are unconnected 
with the main topic of the dream, or are of too 
personal and private a nature to communicate. 
But if the analysand finally succeeds in abandon- 
ing the restraint which he feels and utters uncon- 
ditionally all the fancies supplied by his Uncon- 
scious, no matter how trivial and irrelevant these 
ideas seem, it is by virtue of a transference of 
his confidence from himself or from some other 
person to the analyser. This transference does 
not always occur all at once, but may alternate 
with resistances which are shown in multitudinous 
ways. One of these is the appearance of new 
disease symptoms. A woman compulsion-neurosis 
patient of one of the European psychoanalysts 
manifests her transference to the physician by a 
direct avowal of love for him. To his explana- 
tion that this affection was perfectly natural and 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 261 

merely showed a recrudescence, with him as an 
object, of an infantile-erotic phantasy, her reaction 
was a sudden sensation on her tongue as if she 
had burned it. To this he replied that the 
" burnt " tongue only symbolised her disappoint- 
ment in not having her affection returned by him 
in the same degree, an explanation which she did 
not at first accept. When, however, the burnt 
tongue sensation vanished upon this explanation, 
she admitted that his view of the case had been 
correct. 

We may suppose here that the new symptom 
has been produced by the Unconscious, here act- 
ing as a sort of advocatus diaboli, for the purpose 
of having it removed by the physician, in which 
view it appears as a new proof of transference, — 
that is, a display of confidence in the ability of the 
physician to set things right by his new way of 
looking at them (reclassification, resymbolising). 
There is a transference here in a double sense. 
The malady of the patient is transferred or trans- 
muted for the time being into another one having 
a different symptom, and the fact that it promptly 
vanishes is to be regarded as analogous with the 
possibility that the other symptoms will similarly 
disappear. 

The fundamental facts of the transference, how- 
ever, are that consciousness tends, particularly 
that dominated by the Unconscious which has 



262 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

remained at the pleasure-pain level, immediately 
to seek for a remedy for any physical ailment. In 
this respect the transference of the craving to the 
person of the analyser is similar to the original 
feeling which the individual as a child had for 
the father, so that the frequent recourse to doc- 
tors, clergymen, lawyers and other advisers, like 
appeals to persons for any kind of help in any 
difficulty whatever, are an expression of the father- 
imago mentioned in Chapter VII. 

It is needless to say that, as the main object of 
psychoanalytic therapeutics is to remove the pa- 
tient from the infantile level of the pain-pleasure 
principle to the adult level of the reality prin- 
ciple, the accomplishment of this aim, if attained, 
will result in at least a diminution of the degree of 
this transference. The craving of the patient for 
the sympathy of the physician, which is an infantile 
one, and therefore introversional in its character, 
has to be turned outward upon the world of real- 
ity. In plain words, the patient has to find some- 
thing real to do in order to satisfy the craving 
for production, which, if completely introverted, 
has the effect of destroying the owner and ignorant 
misuser of it. 

The phenomena of transference are not peculiar 
to psychoanalysis. They account for the doctor's 
being called in on many unnecessary occasions, and 
for the fact that half the average general practi- 



PSYCHOTHERAPY 263 

doner's cases are trivial ills in which the vis 
medicatrix naturae would be quite as efficacious as 
the physician's doses, though probably not quite 
so good as in combination with his reassuring 
words and presence. 

Occasionally, too, the physician, having read 
a bit of psychoanalysis, attempts to go into the 
study of the Unconscious of the patient, and the 
result is a romance or a near-tragedy. One such 
physician in a large Eastern city, after a detailed 
study of the unconscious cravings of one of his 
woman patients, found himself faced with a posi- 
tive transference on her part of so strenuous a 
nature that he was forced to drop the case entirely 
and hand it over to an experienced psychoanalyst. 

While the phenomena of transference are not 
peculiar to psychoanalysis, it is quite certain that 
the psychoanalytic investigation of it is the deep- 
est that has yet been made and that the numerous 
problems connected with it, and indeed with the 
relation of doctor, minister and teacher to their 
proteges, chiefly but not solely of the opposite sex, 
have come nearer to a solution by this means than 
by any other. 

" In this connection it should be remembered 
finally that normal individuals, too, very fre- 
quently show a slight physical manifestation [of 
the repressed archaic wish]. A pain in the head 
or stomach, a slight intestinal catarrh, a mild in- 



264 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

somnia and similar trivial ills are many times of 
psychogenic nature (mental origin) and belong to 
the experiences of everyday life, which are gotten 
rid of by a little occasional analysis (often 
through self-analysis). Who is there who is not 
the least bit nervous? The famous neurologist 
Mobius stated in all seriousness that every human 
had hysterical symptoms. No one has denied it " 
(Pfister I.e., p. 160). 



CHAPTER XII 

EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 

Thinking that is directed only according to the 
plans of the modern systems of education fails, 
through its not taking into account the results of 
the symbolisation that the Unconscious is continu- 
ally forming so as to push up from the depths 
below the expression of its craving. 

We have shown by means of illustrations how 
some of the most commonplace actions of every- 
day life are the symbolic expressions of primal 
cravings misunderstood and misapplied by the 
conscious life. In the actual training given by 
teachers in schoolrooms very little if any of 
this symbolism is recognised and the pupils are 
wrenched to fit a Procrustean bed instead of hav- 
ing their personalities developed according to the 
characteristics with which nature endowed them. 
If figs are not gathered of thorns, it is impossible 
to expect a certain kind of result from the classical 
type of training. But every child has a feeling of 
inferiority before any educational task, whether it 
be arithmetic or history or Latin, and the sense 
of mastery, which is especially strong in boys, 

265 



266 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 









should be employed by the teacher in all school 
work, for we now know that it is as inevitable 
as sunshine, and that the young person is bound to 
get it out of some source, even out of his own 
body, or abuse of his own mind. If the example in 
arithmetic is not solved, the pupil is much more 
likely to take his gratification from the dream-life 
of the moving-picture shows, where anything that 
human desire can conceive is represented as a 
visual reality, but it is equally true that so great 
a gratification may be derived from the successful 
performance of a school task that it will com- 
pletely satisfy the craving of the individual, in fact 
produce a craving for more satisfaction of the 
same nature. That is what we call getting thor- 
oughly interested in arithmetic or in history or in 
any branch of school work. 



A. The Object of Mental Activity 

The aim of all psychic life is to produce an 
effect upon that which is not psychic. Otherwise 
it would have no reason for its existence. The 
aim of all mental activity is to change material 
states. This effect alone is the justification for any 
mental life in the universe, just as we have seen 
in the chapter on Therapy that the time in evolu- 
tion at which consciousness entered was the exact 
moment that some physical difficulty was en- 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 267 

countered. Perfect mechanical smoothness or 
running needs no conscious direction by any mental 
factor, nor any adaptation nor readjustment. So 
that the only reason for there being in our world 
any forms of mental life higher than mere sensa- 
tion is that there is a change to be wrought in 
the material world outside of us. This is ex- 
pressed in other words by saying that the energy 
developed by the impingement of any force on our 
sensory system would again go right out from, or 
be immediately reflected by, the brain, if reflex 
action is to be regarded as mental action, or if 
reflex action were the only form of mental action. 
But the amount of energy admitted from the out- 
side world through the gates of the senses, does 
not all issue immediately as reflex action. Some 
of this energy remains locked up in the higher 
brain centres and at any appropriate time may be 
let loose by purely mental causes, — that is, inde- 
pendently of whether there is energy entering at 
the same time through the gates of the senses or 
not. So it is evident that there has been here a 
transformation or conversion of physical, material 
energy into a form of energy which we shall call 
psychical energy, and that psychical energy is 
totally different from physical energy in appear- 
ance. That is, it may, like potential energy in 
matter, lie dormant for a long time, or appear to 
do so, and all of a sudden be changed into physical 



268 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

energy just as from static electricity to dynamic in 
a flash of lightning, without that change being 
effected by any physical cause. Thus we have a 
stream of energy flowing in from the outer world 
to the psyche and either issuing at once from the 
psyche toward the world again, or stored in 
the psyche either for use at another time or for the 
purpose of accumulation. The ingoing stream is 
compensated for or balanced by an outgoing 
stream. The balance is rarely even. It is evi- 
dent that a current if flowing only in one direction 
would be an utter absurdity, and this proves that 
the only object of the stream of energy entering 
the psyche from the outside world is that it may 
again be transformed by the activities of the 
psyche, in moulding the energy and reshaping it 
according to a mental or psychical or spiritual or 
cosmical plan. This plan is one which originates 
in the psychical realm and is imposed upon the 
material world. But to go into the question 
either of proving this or of showing in what way 
the transition between the purely psychical and the 
physical is effected would take us far out of our 
way and into metaphysical spheres which are less 
interesting and profitable. The facts to be clearly 
understood are that there is a stream of energy 
going in both directions, to and from the psyche, 
and that the one going from the psyche is subject 
to great variations. 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 269 

Now, it is of greatest importance in our present 
consideration to keep clearly before us the fact 
that the object of education is to produce an effect, 
and to train our children to produce an effect, not 
on themselves but on the outer world, not a plan- 
less effect which " marks the earth with ruin," but 
an effect which shall be in agreement with the 
plan above mentioned. This plan, though it 
originates in the psychical realm, does not come 
from one man's mind completely formed, like 
Minerva from the head of Jupiter, but from the 
minds of many men, all of them constituting a 
social unit and working together for the accom- 
plishment of a certain definite though unconscious 
purpose. 

A very insidious fallacy in educational theory 
and a deplorable defect in educational practice 
is caused by a failure to realise exactly this point. 
From some of the implications of the principle 
that what must be done in education is to develop 
the child's mind and body separately {mens sana 
in corpore sano) as if they could be separately 
developed and that mens could be put into the 
body when it got sana enough or could be taken 
out of the body for sanitation and returned to the 
body at the end of the school day. But it should 
be carefully borne in mind that what we are edu- 
cating for is to develop in the child an ability to 
effect, according to a plan, changes uoon the world 



270 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

of reality outside of him, and not to make any 
change in himself the primary aim. The only 
thing that is going to make Johnny a good boy or 
a different boy is the changes which Johnny has, 
according to a plan, created in his own surround- 
ings. 

This definitely cuts out all phantasying, for 
while phantasying is a form of psychic activity, 
it has for its object the psyche itself on which all 
its effects are produced. It may be remarked here 
that there is a kind of mental activity which is pro- 
ductive in that it causes an effect on reality, — 
postponed, to be sure, or transposed, as when a 
novelist writes his story for the subsequent amuse- 
ment of mankind, or when an accountant is audit- 
ing the books of a big business house ; and it may 
be said that in teaching English as it is taught 
today in the schools we are, if not making him 
productive at the present time, preparing him to 
be productive at a future time. So we teach him 
Latin, both with the purpose of subjecting his 
unconscious cravings to direction and to furnish 
his mind with material which he will use at a 
later time. The same remark applies to mathe- 
matics above the simple operations of arithmetic. 
The question of the formative value is one much 
discussed, and that of the mental furniture is not 
yet satisfactorily solved; for the postponement 
of the time when the individual shall be pro- 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 271 

ductive is to a later and later date as the years 
go on. 

Mention has already been made of the book Die 
Psych an alytische Methode by Oscar Pfister,* 
which is devoted to the application of the psycho- 
analytic procedure to the problems of education. 
There is no other book dealing directly with this 
subject in English. It is also quite out of the 
question to give anything like a thorough treat- 
ment of even a single phase of the subject in a 
chapter in a general review of so large a topic 
as I have attempted to deal with in the present 
volume. 

There are, however, a number of general con- 
siderations which no one having anything to do 
with education can afford to ignore. The first and 
most important fact that should be recognised by 
teachers and others interested in education is the 
unconscious resistance on the part of the pupil to 
everything that the teacher represents. This re- 
sistance may be coexistent with the most polite 
acquiescence, the result of a strong home training, 
and with the most excellent ability, — both of 
which, to be sure, make the friction between pupil 
and teacher less, — but both of these qualities are 
quite independent of the natural unconscious re- 
sistance to the authority of the teacher. The 
necessity for the outward show of authority is of 

* Leipzig and Berlin, 1913, viii -J- 512 pp. Trans, by Payne, 1917. 



272 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

course greater in schools where the classes are 
large, and where for that reason there seems to be 
less opportunity for elasticity, and where the 
authority of the teacher is correspondingly exag- 
gerated. In smaller schools where more of the 
teacher's attention is secured for each pupil, there 
is still found a great proportion of the authority 
element in spite of the possibly stronger feeling 
of camaraderie between teachers and pupils. In- 
deed, it is one of the compensations of the ambiva- 
lence of the educational situation that some 
smaller schools, in order to defend themselves 
against a supposed laxity in the performance of 
their functions, stiffen their curriculum and in- 
crease their paternalistic authority for the purpose 
of raising their standard of scholarship. 

Now, this paternalistic trend of education 
necessarily proceeds from the view of education 
as a transmitting of the experience of the race to 
the individual. It is implied that the teacher has 
a better and wider experience than the pupil and 
that his object is to make the pupil see that it will 
be better for him to avail himself of this accumu- 
lated knowledge, for the uplift of the race. 
Right here the teacher is faced with the uncon- 
scious resistance of the pupil in the fact that the 
pupil's Unconscious, seeking always for a means 
of increasing his sense of superiority, so as to 
remove the painful feeling of inferiority which is 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 273 

the cause of all fables, is sure that at bottom it 
knows better than the teacher, better than the 
father, better in fact than all the world, when it 
sets itself up as an authority. The school, the 
teachers and the work are to the Unconscious of 
the child of any age barriers set up between it 
and the following of its own bent, which as we 
have seen is for phantastic as opposed to directed 
thinking. 

B. The Father-Image 

The school has for a long time been looked at 
as in loco parentis , or as taking, for the time dur- 
ing which the child is in school, the place of the 
parent. As the vast majority of teachers in this 
country are women, it might be supposed that the 
parent represented by the school is the mother. 
A little reflection, however, will show that this 
is a mistake. The unmarried women suited by 
nature for successful class management in large 
schools are usually those who show to some ex- 
tent an overweighting of the masculine end of 
their bisexuality. In order to deliver their mes- 
sage, which is essentially a message of masculine 
to feminine, they inevitably though unconsciously 
themselves assume at least a modicum of the mas- 
culine element of authority. 

It is necessary here to recall what has been 
found by psychoanalysis concerning the father- 




274 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

image. To the Unconscious of the child, school 
and all it represents, no matter how sweetly the 
work is sugar-coated with the different " activi- 
ties," — athletic, literary, dramatic, etc., — is a 
father-image. Every unconscious trend of the 
adolescent human (and remember how many of us 
are ourselves, in our Unconscious, merely adoles- 
cent and not adult) revolts, because it is infantile 
and archaic, from any restrictions upon the natu- 
ral expression of its cravings. And the school is 
not only a representative of society, like the endo- 
psychic censor, and of the restrictions of society 
upon the free play of the manifestation of the 
child's unconscious craving, but is in most cases a 
more highly organised system than society itself. 
Nowhere do restrictions bristle more threateningly 
than in school. This is particularly true of large 
schools where much red tape has to be unwound. 
It is inevitable, however, that this should be 
so. The child cannot be left to follow its own 
phantasies, which would lead it deeper and deeper 
into introversion. The boy and the girl must be 
taken, as few parents take them, and impressed 
with the difference between the pleasure-pain prin- 
ciple and the reality principle. That is the great, we 
might almost say the only, task of the teacher, — 
to make a man out of a boy, to make a woman 
out of a girl. There must needs be a sacrifice of 
all that the child unconsciously holds dear. All 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 275 

its regressive, autistic tendencies must be com- 
bated on every hand, and it must be led gently and 
continuously to an appreciation of the value of 
directed thinking. 

Pfister's words (p. 466) are so apposite here 
that I must quote him at some length : 

" The teacher very often is for the pupil a 
father-surrogate. And yet if he shows more traits 
that recall the mother, he will be identified with 
her. The pupil therefore transfers to the repre- 
sentative of the parents the feelings belonging to 
the one or the other of them. If he hates his 
father, the same hard feeling will be shown toward 
the teacher who resembles him, while possibly an- 
other instructor receives the love felt for the 
mother. The transposition is very clear in patho- 
logical cases, — for example, in serious cases of 
terror. 

" Therefore the teacher may be assured that he 
enters into the inheritance of his pupil's father, or 
may even figure as contrast-surrogate. If he acts 
accordingly, he is spared much unnecessary disci- 
pline and other unpleasantness. He does good to 
the pupil, too. In the teacher the young neurotic 
wishes to subdue the father. He does not see 
that he ought to learn for his own sake, he thinks 
of his mentor, and to his own harm he gives him- 
self up to the father-complex. 






I 






276 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

" If then the teacher gives way to anger, the 
pupil has gratified the evil pleasure of his Uncon- 
scious. Also the other errors in instruction, which 
the pupil discovers with shrewd ingenuity, are 
evoked in great part from the Unconscious of the 
teacher. 

" There are many teachers who wish to identify 
themselves with their fathers or to outdo them, 
and who have chosen this calling for that reason.* 
It is evident that they find themselves in a sad 
position. There are excellently endowed teachers 
who commit one educational mistake after an- 
other, treat the pupils in a completely mistaken 
way, and get lamentable results, because they 
labour under a negative father-complex. One of 
our best analysts tells of a patient who as teacher 
identified himself with his father, who was an 
over-energetic army officer, and as a clergyman 
with his mild-mannered mother. This man acted 
toward his pupils with the same sternness that he 
had perceived in his father, and later toward his 
parishioners with an almost feminine gentleness. 
The mistakes of the class mirror much more 
clearly the complexes of their teacher, than their 
lack of training reflects the repressions and fixa- 
tions of their parents. If we wish to reform edu- 

* Maeder tells of a neurotic teacher who constantly phantasied 
himself as an animal tamer or as a field marshal warring against 
an army. He would gladly have been a soldier. Poor pupils! 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 277 

cation, I know of no better means to that end 
than instructing the teachers in psychanalysis. 
Whenever I have had the pleasure of analysing 
my colleagues I have observed a shock at the 
revelation of many mistakes in instruction that 
had been made under the influence of their com- 
plexes. 

" This spiritual purification is the more im- 
portant as the complexes of the teacher and the 
pupils act as magnets to each other. If we are 
unaware of our own inner entanglements, we prob- 
ably act the unconscious coypist, and we satisfy 
our ambition, but we only act a part before the 
pupil and hardly perceive his highest inter- 
ests. 

" The more fundamentally we look through 
the pupil the more interesting he becomes to us. 
And the more deeply he feels himself seen through 
by us the more influence we gain with him. He 
will then no longer attempt, by means of uncon- 
sciously produced headaches, to avoid complying 
with even necessary requests, and, by means of un- 
consciously arranged sufferings to evoke our sym- 
pathy, make himself out to be a sacrifice to 
over-exertion when he is lazy. 

" If the teacher is freed from the odium of an 
unloved father, and becomes an approved father- 
surrogate, so again in his turn he will employ this 
relation for the purpose of leading the pupil to 






278 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

the real task of life, the free self-determination. 
Why should not a man teacher allow himself to 
be admired just a little by young girls who have to 
turn somewhere with their feelings? Only the 
schoolgirls must gain the sympathy of the teacher 
by means of efficient work. Against hysterical 
infatuation, which I am wont to speak of ironically 
as psychic sugar sickness, one must take a quiet 
stand and gently decline. Morally questionable 
pupils must be treated with great circumspection, 
so that in realising a wish they do not reproach 
the teacher with improper attentions.* 

" It is certain that psychanalysis essentially 
furthers the theory of education in producing a 
proper affective basis for real study. It often hap- 
pens that an aversion to a certain subject or to 
several of them can be removed by analysis. One 
boy was not able to learn mathematics and lan- 
guages because his father kept insisting that he 
should study them, but in natural science and 
manual training, which in his case were associated 
with his mother, he did excellent work. In un- 
covering the father-complex, psychanalysis en- 

* In the morally defective it is likely to happen that they 
accuse the psychoanalyst of immoral purposes and even actions. 
This happens not alone in psychoanalytic practice. Before now 
immoral or hysterical girls have put guiltless men teachers in 
jail. Only it appears that with exact knowledge of the trans- 
ference and its proper treatment the analytic method is in this 
respect much less dangerous than any other. 



i . 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 279 

listed the excellent abilities of the boy in the inter- 
est of the formerly hated subjects." 

The antagonism between teacher and pupil is 
a natural one resting on and being caused not only 
by the unconscious element in the pupil but also by 
that of the teacher. If the pupil can get the 
teacher by the ears, whether done coarsely, as in 
the hoarse voice of an uncivilised street arab in 
the schools of a great city, or gently and with re- 
fined elegance of language in some girls' boarding 
school, it is a pulling over of the teacher by the 
child to the child's thought material. Actually 
there ought to be enough mental material at the 
disposal of the teacher to weigh so much both in 
the teacher's estimation and in the pupil's that no 
room could be found for any antagonism. Dis- 
order in a schoolroom is always the indication of 
a vacuum being filled. There is generally a 
vacuum in the minds of most pupils which needs 
filling in the right way. It is impossible for the 
child to fill it properly in a schoolroom except with 
ideas directed by the teacher. If the teacher is 
full of unanalysed complexes it will be much easier 
for the pupil to throw him off the track. This is 
especially true of the power-complex which is most 
likely to be found in the teacher, for the petty 
power exercised in the schoolroom must, as Pfister 
suggests, furnish an unconscious attraction to 



28o MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

many persons, leading them to adopt this calling, 
just as the vocation of locomotive engineer, fire- 
man or policeman furnishes an attraction to chil- 
dren of a much younger age. 



C. The Superiority Feeling 

The Unconscious of the pupil, always looking 
out for a chance to get its satisfaction from a 
sense of power, instinctively tries it out on any 
teacher that is either new to the school or new to 
the pupil. It seems as if no work was to be done 
for a new teacher until a trial of strength was 
had between the Unconscious of the teacher and 
those of the pupils. There arise in this connec- 
tion some very painful scenes in which the teacher 
and the pupil are really making love to each other, 
but in archaic modes. The view of the matter 
which psychoanalysis forces upon us may be illus- 
trated by an analysis of the situation in which for 
some form of classroom disorder a pupil has be- 
come offensive to the teacher. The unsocial na- 
ture of the pupil's overt acts is rarely brought 
home to him. He is probably told repeatedly that 
while he is making noises, or even while he is 
merely inattentive, he is impeding the work of the 
school. But while he may verbally admit it, he is 
at heart unconvinced, for what does his Uncon- 
scious, which, by hypothesis, is the power under 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 281 

whose control the major portion of his personality 
is operating, care for the work of the school? 
The sense of power which must constantly be fed 
in him by all his surroundings, in order to satisfy 
his unconscious craving, is supported by any 
knowledge on his part which is not shared by 
the teacher. If he, in the battle of knowledge 
which rages in so many schools, can rest assured 
that he knows something that the teacher does 
not know, his feeling of superiority is satisfied. 
This accounts for a goodly proportion of class- 
room disorder, including mysterious noises of un- 
certain origin, as well as an unnecessary loudness 
of noises that, while inevitable where there are 
thirty or forty persons in an uncarpeted, undraped 
room, is hidden under the possibility of being an 
accident. The pupil making this minor disturb- 
ance knows who made it. So do several other 
pupils. Therefore they know something that 
the teacher does not know. If the teacher 
is not above the childish state of mind, there 
is a battle waged by the teacher and pupil 
on a very low level, — that is, the level of 
the child's infantility, expressed in this one trait 
of thirst for power, regardless of what that 
power is. 

Another form of knowledge in which the pupil 
is the superior of the teacher is the external facts 
of the pupil's home conditions. A very different 



282 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

attitude of the pupil has been observed after the 
teacher has asked the pupil who his father is, and 
what is his business, how many brothers and 
sisters he has, etc., or any number of personal de- 
tails, without the slightest reference to the form 
of disorder which may have caused the teacher's 
attention to be specially directed toward this pupil. 
Often too the work improves at once. It might 
be said that if the teacher by this means takes 
away the superiority of the pupil in this particular, 
he is also descending to a level on which any battle 
of knowledge is waged. But the knowledge of 
who made a certain noise in the schoolroom is not 
comparable with the knowledge of the social 
status of the pupil in value for multiplying the 
social relations between the teacher and the pupil, 
and there is a very different effect produced. It 
may be said in general that the pupil unconsciously 
realises the difference between the teacher's know- 
ing his subject, and his object, namely the pupil, 
and acts accordingly. The pupil unconsciously 
knows when the teacher does not know him, and 
also that it is the teacher's duty to know him, and 
how to handle him. Even the unconscious realisa- 
tion on the part of the pupil that the teacher is 
defective in that one particular is a cause of the 
pupil's feeling of superiority, which as we have 
seen is so great a necessity to his satisfactions 
from the infantile point of view, which satisfac- 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 283 

tions he is constrained by his Unconscious to get at 
any cost. 

Connected with all this is also the child's natural 
tendency toward exhibitionism. Just as we have 
seen in the account of the development of the indi- 
vidual psyche that one of the characteristics of the 
infant was to gain pleasure from the stimulation 
of the cutaneous erogenous zones, by running 
around unclothed, so the descendant of that desire 
to show off (and its converse, to peep) is the 
wish — unconscious, to be sure — to show off be- 
fore schoolmates and teacher. And the trait 
which if developed far enough is to make an adult 
of the child, — namely, the wish to effect changes 
not upon himself but upon the outside world, — is 
sometimes arrested at the point where his outside 
world is constituted mainly by persons on whom 
it is very easy to make some sort of effect. The 
Unconscious of the child does not care what the 
effect is. It cares only to feel the results of its 
actions on some other person. Hence it teases its 
companions, because the effect of that teasing, 
whether pleasant or unpleasant to the person 
teased, are its effects, produced by its efforts, and 
gratify its wish for power. In irritating the 
teacher, therefore, the child is unconsciously ex- 
pressing its wish for control and power over the 
external world which later is perhaps to consist 
not solely of persons but of things. It will be 



284 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

well, therefore, to analyse the situation where the 
pupil has succeeded in irritating the teacher. 
There are loud-voiced teachers in every school, 
their voices unmistakably showing their irritation. 
So I shall not be very wide of the mark if I point 
out to these and others how this matter of irrita- 
tion is regarded by psychoanalysis. 



D. " He Irritates Me " 

The words " He irritates me " or " He arouses 
my antipathy " are equivalent to " He excites my 
Unconscious." These words may be imagined as 
either spoken or thought by either a male or a 
female teacher, and " He " may stand for " She ' 
in either case. Now because there is in the Un- 
conscious only one kind of excitement, — viz. : 
sexual excitement, — the proposition is equivalent 
to " He sexually excites my Unconscious." The 
struggle between the archaic Unconscious and the 
modern social conscious life is such that this an- 
tagonism implied in the conscious repugnance and 
the unconscious attraction is quite comprehensible. 
The verbal expression " He irritates me " is the 
external manifestation of a psychic state in which 
there is a transference, positive or negative mat- 
ters little, for the positive unconscious transfer- 
ence is usually compensated for by a negative con- 
scious affection, and vice versa. The significant 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 285 

feature of the situation is that if I am irritated by 
any person or thing, my irritation shows that the 
person or thing is occupying my thoughts too 
much. My thoughts ought to be completely 
occupied with matters which by their importance 
preclude the possibility of being disturbed by any 
fortuitous circumstance. In other words, there 
exists in the mind a group of thoughts (repre- 
sentations) having an unpleasant affective tone, 
where there ought either to be affective indiffer- 
ence or a pleasant affective tone, this requirement 
for mental wholesomeness depending on whether 
the pleasure-pain principle or the reality principle 
is given the preference. Thus any irritation on the 
part of the teacher marks him at once as being on 
a lower level of development than is desirable in 
one who is supposed to be able to raise others to 
a higher level of social development. It should 
not be forgotten, either, that the Unconscious of 
the irritating child is making every attempt in its 
power to produce any effect upon the teacher, no 
matter what that effect may be. The child, of 
course, does not know this, and his ignorance 
of it but makes him the more subject to its 
control. 

On the theory that avoidance of pain and 
the seeking of pleasure is the greatest desideratum 
in our plan of life, it would be necessary to replace 
the thought " He irritates me " with some other 



286 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 






thought such as " But he [that is, some other he], 
or it, gratifies me." This is because gratifying 
thoughts — i.e. those containing pleasure elements, 
and therefore constructive and anabolic because 
pleasure-giving — should predominate in the mind 
of any person, and will predominate in the person 
who is best to perform his work in the world. 
This is to be taken in connection with the fact that 
the psyche, in states of mind that are gratifying, 
is united, while in states of mind containing an 
unpleasant factor it is disunited and distracted, 
at variance with itself and the scene of a 
conflict in which part of the psyche is at 
war with the other part. So that even on 
the comparatively low plane of the pleasure- 
pain principle the feeling that he irritates me is 
a feeling that should at once be replaced by an- 
other of opposite affective tone. The fact is that 
the thoroughly analysed individual ought not to 
be irritated at anything, and for two reasons. The 
first is that he should realise that being irritated at 
anything shows that he is too much interested in 
that thing, and second he should know that the 
irritation is not a quality of the object itself that 
irritates him. Inanimate objects, of course every- 
body will admit, are not to blame for anything; 
and when he realises that animate objects, men, 
women, children and animals, do what they do for 
the same reasons that motivate his own acts, he 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 287 

cannot consistently blame them for anything they 
do. He is, besides, to remember that his clear 
obligation is to adapt himself to his environment, 
whatever it is. In this case he is not to do that 
which his own Unconscious would naturally lead 
him to do, — namely, to get rid of the irritating 
animate or inanimate object as soon as possible or 
to devise means of ignoring its existence. This 
would be but introverting and trying to get from 
himself the satisfaction which rightly he ought to 
get from the external world. He is, on the other 
hand, to get rid as soon as possible of the irrita- 
tion itself, by rearranging the relations between 
himself and the irritating object, so that he can 
continue with his appointed or his desired work 
with the greatest possible efficiency. 

If the situation " He irritates me " is consid- 
ered from the other point of view, — namely, that 
of the reality principle, — the affects will have 
to be ruled out entirely, on the ground that the 
person acting entirely on the reality principle is 
indifferent to all emotions that are connected with 
his activities. 

" He irritates me " is not literally true because 
the affects characterising that state of mind called 
irritation originate and go through their full 
course of development in the Unconscious of the 
irritated person. All affects are reactions of the 
Unconscious to the stimuli streaming in from 






288 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

the environment. Whether these affects are 
pleasant or unpleasant, constructive or destruc- 
tive in their physiological effect, depends not at 
all upon any quality inherent in the stimuli them- 
selves, but on a combination of qualities which 
are innate in the psyche. To the pure all things 
are pure, and to the young all adventures, even 
mishaps, are fun. The misplacement of a dollar 
is accompanied by one affect in the poor man, by 
another in the rich man (not the miser, for the 
miser is a poor man in the bestowal of money). 
So that to say " He irritates me " or " He arouses 
my antipathy " is another way, a blind, illogical 
way, of saying: " I cause myself unpleasant emo- 
tions because of his conduct." In putting this 
proposition in the simple active transitive form, 
we are making a misstatement. He is not doing 
the irritating. All the irritating that occurs is 
being done by my reaction to him. It is all my act, 
not his. How then shall we take teasing, which 
looks on the face of it exactly like voluntary pur- 
posive attempts at irritating, designed by the per- 
petrator as a means to hurt or annoy me? There 
are several ways of looking at this. The first and 
most obvious way is to see that his attentions to 
me are caused by his undue interest in me, — an 
interest which may, by the proper methods, at once 
be turned into actions with pleasant results, — or 
that, in the case of children teasing each other, it 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 289 

is merely a matter of natural Sadism or possibly 
exhibitionism. 

Another way is to realise that his Unconscious, 
like mine, is misleading him as it does me. That 
implies that if he really understood what he was 
doing, he would immediately change and do some- 
thing else, and that if he is incapable of under- 
standing what he is doing he is completely insane 
and irresponsible. This is not the case in the ma- 
jority of instances, as we know. We do not live 
in close touch with such people, as a general rule. 
In one way I should be flattered at the attention 
I am receiving. Many people are. They would 
much rather be teased than completely ignored, 
and as for the other thing, — being openly made 
love to, — that is accompanied by too much 
dynamics for the thing to be completely acceptable. 
There is aggression even in love. The central 
point of the whole consideration is the bare fact 
that those thoughts and not others occupy his 
mind. Like all other thoughts, they have their 
source in the Unconscious, and for anyone to be 
occupied with a certain line of thoughts involving 
the affects of another person is a kind of autistic 
or undirected thinking, which it is the object of so- 
ciety and its instrument, education, as much as pos- 
sible to do away with. It is to be noted here what 
becomes of the person who thinks he is being 
wronged, i.e. irritated, by all men. He becomes 



I 



290 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

a paranoiac if the suspicion is consistently carried 
on too far. The difference between paranoia and 
suspiciousness is one of degree only. All sup- 
positions that we are the object of hatred by many 
persons are essentially paranoiac. For they show 
a wrong attitude toward reality, or that part of 
it constituted by our fellow-men. True rationality 
laughs at the supposition that there is a concerted 
devotion to the cause of injuring one person, but 
that is exactly what is at the base of the paranoiac 
delusions. 

So, then, the question arises as to what should 
be the attitude of the teacher in any circumstances 
that he may find irritating. Of course the readi- 
est expedient is to conceal the irritation. That 
only drugs the symptom, it does not cure the dis- 
ease. The only cure is a complete analysis of the 
mental elements entering into the situation. This 
is inevitably different in different persons, accord- 
ing to their development along the line which 
goes from infantility to adulthood, as briefly 
sketched in the chapter on the development of the 
individual psyche. It is possible that there may be 
some cases in which the mental constitution of the 
child plays a great part in the situation, as, for 
instance, if the child is naturally a nervous case 
and below the normal in the psychical develop- 
ment indicated above. But the chances are that 
the trouble lies only with the teacher. 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 291 

The expedient of concealing the irritation is a 
very poor one, too, because it almost never works. 
There are too many signs of irritation uncon- 
sciously displayed by the teacher which the Un- 
conscious of the pupil is only too eagerly watching 
for, because they give it a very solid satisfaction. 
We have here as everywhere both unconscious 
systems working, that of the teacher and that of 
the pupil. The results of the unconscious obser- 
vation of the teacher by the pupil are unknown to 
the teacher, and of course the results of the 
teacher's unconscious attitude toward the pupil 
are unknown by the pupil. The duty of the 
teacher in this case is the same as the duty of all 
humans in all the situations in which they find 
themselves in their daily life, which is to bring 
into consciousness the elements of their uncon- 
scious life, and, as we saw in the chapter on 
the cure of diseases, to work off the emo- 
tions connected with the experience which has 
taken on an unpleasant affect, and thus to remove 
not only the unpleasant affect but the chances that 
possibly this unpleasant affect may become sub- 
ject to conversion, — that is, that the energy con- 
tained in it may discharge itself upon the physical 
organism of the person thus disturbed. Of course 
it is possible that the mental state of the teacher 
contains complexes which cannot be brought into 
consciousness unaided. In that case the teacher 



D 



292 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

will need a complete analysis by a trained analyst 
in order to discover what are the real causes at 
work in the Unconscious. But it is also possible 
that a little self-analysis, which is the only form 
available at present for the majority of persons, 
may throw some light upon the matter of some of 
the schoolroom troubles which have been here dis- 
cussed. By studying his dreams, his mistakes in 
spelling, reading, writing, speaking, and his symp- 
tomatic actions, trivial ( ?) mannerisms, habits of 
doing even the most commonplace things, he may 
be able to place himself where he belongs on the 
scale of development of the psyche and take up- 
ward steps. The chances are against the average 
mortal's doing this unaided, because the results of 
such measuring of self on the scale of psychical 
development are so excruciatingly humiliating. 
Such a mental inventory is so opposed to the in- 
clinations of his own Unconscious that it throws 
in the way of the accountant every possible ob- 
struction. First of all it will make him forget to 
do it at the proper time. He may have difficulty 
in remembering his dreams. It will constantly 
occur to him that the whole proceeding is bosh, 
anyway. Arguments against psychoanalysis will 
accumulate in his fore-conscious and will urge him 
to make a more profitable use of his time, etc. 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 293 

E. Memory Work 

The concrete problems of education are so 
numerous and the light afforded them by the 
psychoanalytic viewpoint is so great and so un- 
failing that it would be impossible in a single 
chapter to do more than glance at a few of them. 
One of the most important considerations of edu- 
cational theory is the relation of memory work 
to work that employs the reasoning faculty. It 
will be seen that if the distinction between directed 
and undirected thinking is applied here we shall 
find that while memory work appears at first as 
a case of directed thinking, it really contains ele- 
ments of the undirected kind in such proportions 
that it almost completely vitiates it as an educa- 
tional method. It seems to belong to the directed 
kind of thinking, inasmuch as it requires the fol- 
lowing of a direction on the part of the pupil. 
He must subject his mind to the constraint of 
following the lead of some other whose words he 
is memorising. So far so good. But while the act 
of memorising is a submission on the part of the 
Unconscious to the dictation of the other person 
and in that sense fulfils one of the requirements of 
social activity, the reproduction of the piece that 
is memorised falls almost wholly in the sphere of 
undirected thinking. The pupil who is reciting is 
to a great extent listening to the words of the Un- 



294 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

conscious. We must remember that it is com- 
paratively easy for young persons to commit to 
memory, and after they have done so the process 
of reproducing it is easier still and requires noth- 
ing of the creative or the judgment-forming ac- 
tivity which is necessary in the simplest forms of 
classification. In the act of reciting from memory 
the pupil is as it were borne onward by the un- 
conscious power from within and is not using the 
faculty of directed thinking except in the most 
attenuated form. A piece once learned by heart 
needs no further effort expended upon it. The 
form of mentality employed in reciting it even 
for the first time is akin with all kinds of droning 
monotony. The memorised piece, like all things 
that have crystallised into a fixed form, is to all 
intents and purposes dead and as useless for the 
real constructive work of the psyche as the monu- 
ments of a graveyard. All the mental work that 
could be done on it was done when the piece was 
memorised. 

In mentioning the droning monotony character- 
ising the mentality of pupils who are reciting from 
memory I wish also to call attention to the fact 
that it is very hard to get any young person to 
put very much expression into any piece memo- 
rised, — first, because the expressiveness is a matter 
of experience with the world, of which the young 
people have not very much, and second, because 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 295 

it requires a great amount of mental effort to 
learn the means of dramatic expression, and men- 
tal activity is not characteristic of the infantile. 
So the recitation becomes a dreamy affair in which 
the auditor notices at once that the mind of the 
child is in some other place than the ideal place 
represented by the piece being recited. If these 
remarks apply to dramatic recitations they apply 
with all the more force to the brief efforts neces- 
sary to remember a theorem or a sentence in a 
foreign language. So that on both counts psycho- 
analysis furnishes a very definite reason why 
memory work is a very inferior method of de- 
veloping the psyche. It does not subject the 
mind to the requirements of directed thinking, 
but on the contrary gives a free rein to the un- 
directed variety, or phantasying. For the piece 
once memorised becomes a variety of automatic 
action, and all that is necessary is to touch off the 
first link in the chain and the whole thing repeats 
itself. Its becoming automatic removes it at once 
from the sphere of things which have to be rea- 
soned about, that is, to be compared with other 
things. And we have seen in a previous chapter 
that the fundamental condition of reasoning is 
classification or reasoning by analogy, from which 
we derive even the propositions which form the 
major and minor premises of formal logic. In 
memory work there is no such process of com- 



i 



296 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

parison and classification, but instead of that a 
continuous and more or less monotonous series of 
words, which by their very monotony furnish the 
greatest inducement to the mind to relapse into 
the condition of phantasying. I think all will 
agree with me in this when it is remembered how 
very insecure are the assurances that the child is 
supplementing with the images of his own imagi- 
nation the matter that is memorised. If we were 
sure that the child got the same ideas out of a 
given formula of words that the teacher, with his 
complementing experience, does, it would be a 
different matter. Even if he did, there would 
still remain the question as to whether he was 
not merely phantasying with the images of the 
thought of the memorised passage. All forms of 
monotonous amusement, — beating of a drum or 
whistling or humming or some kinds of singing, — 
are a species of self-hypnotisation in which an 
activity is carried on until it reaches a maximum 
amount of gratification for that kind of activity. 
Its chief characteristic is that the satisfaction is 
of the solitary or asocial sort. In carrying on a 
monotonous activity, either mental or physical, 
the psyche is drawn into itself and the satisfactions 
are all subjective. This is very manifest in recita- 
tions of any great length. There is not one chance 
in a hundred that the auditors are deriving any- 
thing like the satisfaction out of it that the speaker 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 297 

is. And the remark holds true of shorter memory 
gems in a smaller degree. No amount of para- 
digms learned by heart ever contributed an iota 
to the understanding of a Greek drama or a 
Latin epic. 

Any teacher putting too much emphasis on 
memory work is himself taking refuge in his own 
infantility. For the activity of the teacher in 
testing a pupil for his ability to remember is 
one of the least productive activities, not to men- 
tion that native retentiveness is in the long run 
pretty nearly equal, and so does not need testing. 
We all know that a teacher should not merely 
" hear lessons." He can do nothing else except 
hear lessons if he will not study the pupil's point, 
of view with the purpose of getting the pupil 
to take a different point of view. Every step of 
progress presents new points of view and con- 
versely every new angle from which we see a 
thing shows a progress, or a movement of some 
extent. Those who have no new views are those 
who stay immovable and undeveloped. But the 
new point of view is a reclassification, or at least 
is based on a reclassification, of old materials. 
We get our inspiring view of distant valley and 
ocean by means of moving up the side of the 
mountain. But we may move down? Yes, of 
course; but the type of action is totally different. 
In going down we are working only to keep our- 






1298 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

selves from falling, a mode of describing even 
ordinary walking on the level. All education 
is a sort of resymbolisation of the kind men- 
tioned in the chapter on Therapy. If we need a 
resymbolisation in order to enable the psyche to 
cure some of the physical diseases, we similarly 
need to cause a resymbolisation in the pupil's 
mind in order to enable him to rid himself of his 
infantility. 

If the resistance against school as a father- 
image should be removed at the very beginning 
of the child's education, it would not operate as 
it does now to make real education of the emo- 
tions and the will an utter impossibility. But 
those instincts of the child which are at variance 
with the aims of evolving social organism are 
most strongly repressed at the outset of the 
child's school experience, and indeed by the most 
authoritative and paternalistic methods. In con- 
trolling the young child with authority, and in 
forcing him to conform with certain arbitrary 
rules, we crush in the bud what later we most 
desire to develop, — namely, an independence of 
thought and a self-conscious adaptation to the 
needs of society. 

It is necessary only to realise that the father 
or the father-surrogate represents not only re- 
straints but protection, not only roughness but 
warmth, to realise that the attitude of the child 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 299 

to the father-image is a composite one. He re- 
sents the restriction, yet he is glad to repose in 
the absence of responsibility which an authorita- 
tive direction of his activities will give. The atti- 
tude of society toward the child is exactly the 
reverse of what educational practice would seem 
to indicate. Society wishes the child to accept 
cheerfully the necessary restrictions and to take 
as much responsibility as he can manage. So- 
ciety represents a force in opposition to the force 
of psychical gravitation mentioned above. So- 
ciety continually calls the child, the human in- 
dividual of any age, forward and upward and 
outward; the psychic law of gravitation is con- 
tinuously pulling the human of any stage of de- 
velopment backward, downward and inward. 

Now, the school as at present constituted does 
not so much develop the independence as the 
dependence of the child. We confine him in such 
a manner as to make him think his confinement 
is the main part of his education, and not his 
liberation. Just as it is an art to arrange the 
voices of a harmony in such a way that while 
pleasing the ear they may not break loose from 
any of the restrictions of polyphonic composition, 
and yet that while not leaving their convention- 
ally appointed path they may still please the ear, 
so it is an art of the highest type, the art of 
conduct, to arrange the acts of a harmonious day 















300 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

in such relations that they may show the greatest 
variety with the least giving up of restraint. We 
have certain limitations imposed upon us first by 
nature, such as that we cannot be in two places at 
once, secondly by society, such as that we can- 
not be two persons at once. But outside these 
limits we are to express our individuality as 
freely, as abundantly as we can. 

But in modern education of the European- 
American type (hyphenated education) we are 
accentuating only the restraint, only the father- 
image elements, which spell negation for the 
pupil. The constituents of the father-image as 
seen by the pupil in the school are generally only 
deterrent of action and progression. Even the 
formulations of various kinds which he has to 
learn by heart are from one point of view to be 
considered as a release from the necessity of 
forming these generalisations himself. Already 
worded principles are what he wants. They give 
him the only satisfaction he gets from authority, 
— a freedom from responsibility in this case 
consisting of having the general principles ob- 
served for him, and an authority which, at the 
outset of his education, paralyses forever his 
ability to think for himself. Much rather should 
we act toward him with the same expectation that 
Agassiz had of his pupil to whom he gave a fish 
to study, with not the slightest inkling of what 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 301 

he was required to find out about it. We should 
hold from the child the general principles for the 
purpose of making him wrest them from things 
himself. 

F. Abstract Thinking 

The psychoanalytic concept of the Uncon- 
scious, when applied to statements like the fol- 
lowing, illustrates how wonderfully the newer 
psychology illuminates educational problems. " It 
is difficult for the average person to do much 
abstract and sustained thinking. There is ap- 
parently an inertia of mind to be overcome in 
order to do real thinking. The mind becomes 
habituated to acting in certain fixed channels. 
This is rendered more probable on account of 
stereotyped language forms. We sometimes 
think we are expressing ideas when we are using 
only the symbols.* 

The uncertainty expressed in this passage is 
replaced in the psychoanalytic method by definite 
statements of results. We know now just why 
it is so difficult for the average person to do 
much abstract and sustained thinking. It is be- 
cause it is directed thinking, as contrasted with 
phantasying, and consequently runs counter to 
the psychic gravitation, to the wishes of the un- 
conscious Titan. This hypothesis of the uncon- 

* Bolton, F. E. : Principles of Education, p. 595. 






302 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

scious wish, which must be gratified at any cost, 
clearly explains why there is " apparently an 
inertia " " to be overcome in order to do real 
thinking." Real thinking, being directed think- 
ing, requires a total sacrifice, for the time being, 
of all sensuous wishing, which is the tendency of 
the great percentage of our psyche. Against 
such a current it is of course difficult to make 
any headway. 

To be sure, the mind " becomes habituated to 
acting in certain fixed channels " and we know 
from psychoanalysis just what those channels are 
and why the mind becomes thus habituated. The 
psyche which, since its inception, has been wish- 
ing for sense gratifications sees in directed think- 
ing all its food taken away from it, " abstracted " 
by abstract thinking. Is it surprising that, with 
such a weight, the minds of most people rise 
with much difficulty to thinking directed to a 
definite goal, which requires the abandonment of 
so much of the thought process (i.e., phantasy- 
ing) that is natural to mankind? 

As to the " stereotyped language forms," we 
see by the aid of psychoanalysis that many of the 
language forms themselves are but the expres- 
sions of wishes of former generations, which are 
inherited by succeeding generations, and are 
taken on because they fit in the present the same 
general cravings which they did in the past. 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 303 

If we think we are " expressing ideas when we 
are using only the symbols " it is because we do 
not really know what the symbols represent. 
But psychoanalysis teaches us that a symbol is 
always the representative of the wish. In place 
of the crassest wishes are frequently substituted 
the most harmless symbols. Until we received 
the elucidations afforded by the newer psychology 
we did not understand these symbols. Now we 
know that every expression, whether of our own 
idea or others', is a symbol. As every human 
phenomenon is a more or less distorted, dis- 
placed, condensed or otherwise transformed 
symbol of the one primordial craving, it is most 
illuminating and advantageous to have revealed 
to us this essential unity in the sensational multi- 
plicity of our daily life and language. 

" Many people are so unused to thinking for 
themselves that they would be frightened at the 
appearance in consciousness of a thought really 
their own" {Id., p. 591). 

This represents the attitude of all persons in 
spite of the adjuration of philosophers to " Know 
thyself ! " Thinking for oneself necessitates the 
prerequisite of knowing oneself. The first im- 
pulse with all of us, as we have seen in the sec- 
tion on the CEdipus Complex, is to be shocked at 
the revelation that the GEdipus complex is uni- 
versal among mankind and is sublimated or over- 



3o 4 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

come in varying degrees by different people. We 
are frightened at the appearance in consciousness 
of thoughts really our own because the principal 
thoughts that are really our own are those con- 
nected with our own sexuality, and we fear to 
draw the logical conclusions from them. Peo- 
ple are unused to thinking for themselves be- 
cause all really constructive thought, when ap- 
plied to themselves, confronts them with the 
necessity of the great sacrifice of giving up the 
undirected form of thinking and of admitting 
into their consciousness the facts of human fate. 
This does not mean that we have to keep the 
children constantly reminded of death, and en- 
large upon its terrors, but we do have to get them 
gradually to give up the introversional regres- 
sion toward the modes of thought which typify 
dissociation from the rest of society and dissocia- 
tion between the different elements of their own 
natures, and get them by directed thinking, which 
is the only truly social thinking, to unite them- 
selves with the activities of the world of humans 
about them, and by the sacrifice of a part of them- 
selves to gain what is of far greater worth. 



G. Hate, Anger and Love 

Every physical incapacity may be caused by 
the defective mental action of the psyche. It is, 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 305 

as it were, a conflict between a moral and an im- 
moral tendency, or, at any rate, a tendency that 
runs counter to the accepted standard of ethics 
conventional at the time or place. I should not 
appropriate any valuable piece of property not 
my own, because someone has more right to it 
than I. Now if I think of doing so, it appears 
that the psyche becomes at once the scene of a 
battle between the forces that desire this valued 
possession and those that do not think it right 
to take it. If those that desire it are in the over- 
whelming majority, so that the disapproving voices 
are annihilated, the psyche goes on as a unit, after 
quelling the objectors and as a unit maintains its 
psychical and physical health. If, on the other 
hand, the forces opposing it are very much more 
powerful than those that desire it, the valuable 
piece of property is not taken and the psyche 
occupies itself with other and more productive 
objects. But if the forces opposing and those 
favouring the theft are more nearly matched, so 
that the struggle becomes more doubtful, then 
the detriment to the psyche and the harm to the 
body are much greater, because the struggle and 
the vacillation are longer, the discord is more 
protracted, and growth and development in the 
right way is stunted. 

There is something wholesome, health-giving 
and pleasure-giving that may occupy the atten- 



1 



306 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

tion of every person every minute. That some- 
thing is assuredly not angry or resentful feelings 
against the fancied insults or outrages of another 
person or persons. It is not destructive action. 
Angry thoughts are at bottom murderous 
thoughts. There is in every angry thought an 
approximation to the infantile, a regression, an 
element destructive of the fabric of society, which 
has been woven over or through the substratum 
of Titanic states of the psyche. An angry 
thought, in other words, symbolises destruction. 
It is fancifully projected upon our enemy, but it 
takes place in our own vitality. Our enemy fre- 
quently does not even know of its existence. 
Like the tiger shot in the side, that immediately 
bites the wound because the pain is there, we 
damage ourselves by hate. Anger and hate are 
symbols of destruction. When they occur in us 
we are partially and progressively destroyed. 
The image, visual or kinesthetic, which we have 
of striking, killing or otherwise overcoming our 
enemy, we are conscious of, if we are a certain 
type of introspective psychologist. Otherwise 
we do not become conscious of it; but it is there 
and, not subject to conscious control, it stam- 
pedes at its own will, and we know of its results 
only if it breaks forth later in some deed, hateful, 
murderous or insane, or in some unhealthiness of 
body. I have a mental picture of brushing aside 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 307 

my enemy, knocking him into the river or under 
a vehicle or off a precipice. This is a character- 
istic piece of infantile symbolism, it is the object 
created by me out of my own soul on which I 
can satisfy my desire for revenge. I thus live 
in a world of my own, closing my avenues of 
communication with the real world which is con- 
stituted by other people. My reality is the ac- 
tions of other people and things. Now, having 
this mental picture of destruction in my mind's 
eye, and having in my emotional life this excita- 
tion connected with destruction of life, I cannot 
conceive but that this must be in some way me- 
diated from the brain via the sympathetic nerv- 
ous system to the purely vegetative tissues of the 
body and have a sort of catabolic result there. 
\s Possibly when we know more we may know just 
what one of our glands is made anaemic (or, 
figuratively speaking, withered) by exactly what 
violation of the law of society that we have com- 
mitted. The cannibal does not receive physical 
detriment from eating human flesh, because he 
is not conscious of any discord between his act 
and the ideals of the social unit of which he is 
a part. The civilised human would be harmed, 
both physically and mentally, by a similar action 
only if he knew he had done it. 

An act of my neighbour is apperceived by me 
as hostile. If untrained in spiritual things, I re- 



308 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

sent it and take out upon myself through my 
images of destruction. Of these, generally, I am 
conscious only if psychologically trained in intro- 
spection. If I am not so trained, the images re- 
main in the Unconscious as forces that run coun- 
ter to the forward developing of the psyche. 
The images have the same results on the person 
who entertains them, gloats over them, rivets his 
attention upon them, as the imagined acts would 
themselves have, only more weakly in most of us, 
and more slowly. Whether the image evokes the 
emotion or vice versa seems to me to make no 
difference. Image and emotion are so very 
closely connected that they act as a unit, though 
it must be noted that the emotion is the more 
likely of the two to break through into conscious- 
ness, where indeed it may be associated with en- 
tirely different ideas from those which originally 
caused it. 

The physical organism has been trained by 
millennia of evolution to react promptly to stim- 
uli affecting its nutrition, self-preservation and 
reproduction. The act interpreted as hostile may 
be classified only roughly as: "I'll kill or be 
killed''; " I'll injure or be injured." Thousands 
of years of prompt reaction on similar lines must 
have welded together the image of the enemy and 
the fear of death. Now when the light of con- 
sciousness has begun to illuminate so much of 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 309 

our psychic life, we repress our out-striking mur- 
derous acts and we enact the murder in our own 
souls. In the protoplasm of our brains, nervous 
systems, glands and other tissues — in short, in 
our body-and-soul combination — we act as killer 
and killed at one and the same time. The result 
is that something is killed in us by wrong feeling 
and thinking. 

Partial death either of body or mind is no 
impossible conception. As a literal fact parts 
of our bodies die daily. Our epidermis, our 
nails, hair, perspiration and other excreta con- 
stitute a stream of animal tissue that, mostly 
dying before it leaves us, we pour forth each day 
with a feeling of rejuvenation. It is inconceiv- 
able that, in the emotional states of certain types, 
we do not destroy a subtle force, or the physical 
substratum or functional capacity of such force. 
" You fool ! " says my enemy, and if I say 
"Villain!" my image of brushing him aside is 
the symbol of annihilation. Thankful should I 
be if I am conscious of it as a visual or kines- 
thetic image and know enough to realise that if 
perpetuated or propagated by will, desire or at- 
tention on my part, it will, as a symbol, itself 
teem with destructive power and consume the 
heart that warms it. 

All the remarks referring to hate and enmity 
may be made mutatis mutandis about love. Just 



1 



310 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

as the neighbour's act that was interpreted by 
me as hostile aroused in me a desire (grounded 
on an infantile satisfaction) to annihilate or re- 
move the neighbour, so the act of another per- 
son interpreted by me as friendly naturally 
evokes the immediate response of a feeling that 
I wish to multiply him or bring him nearer. By 
multiply him I mean, of course, repeat my ex- 
periences of him. That feeling naturally arouses 
in me the feeling of nutrition, anabolism, propa- 
gation, etc., the act of receiving and welcoming 
him or his acts being a symbol of increase, de- 
velopment, growth. It is now conceivable that 
the number of those whom I am able to welcome 
is a measure of my own power. What I can 
digest is what I have the stomach for (guts). 
Squeamishness, on the contrary, is a symbol of 
weakness. The more power I have, the less I am 
moved by Fortune's buffets and rewards. Those 
persons who want to appear great-minded will 
either pretend to be able to endure much, or will 
after deeper thought gradually realise that there 
is no limit to human endurance, that there is a 
power in each and every one of us which will 
enable us to go any lengths in doing good works. 
It is only the fear of personal harm that steps 
in and acts destructively like hate. The neces- 
sity of fear as an element of hate will be evident 
when we remember that the symbol of hate is 






EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 311 

destruction. I shall be destroyed if I do not 
destroy you. Some may reply that we who live 
in a civilised community do not have to face this 
alternative. The Unconscious, however, does 
not live in a civilised community. It is an archa- 
ism still revivifying for and in us the antediluvian 
ages. 

This alternative necessarily implies fear of 
being destroyed; otherwise we should be just as 
curious and interested in making an experiment 
in personal destruction as we are in anything not 
involving our existence. So that we may truth- 
fully say that we hate nothing we do not fear, 
or further that if we are afraid of nothing we 
shall like everything. If I am unusually fond of 
one thing, that supernormality is determined by 
my Unconscious. Whatever I take satisfaction 
out of, or pleasure in, is symbolic of my present 
psychic state. Certain likings or habits unques- 
tionably symbolise the infantile, such as thumb- 
sucking. If in thumb-sucking the dissimilarities 
in the entire mental and physical complex are out- 
weighed by the similarities; and if the externals, 
such as movements of lips, tongue and hands, are 
so important in comparison with the absence of 
nutrition as to overbalance even the injury to 
finger or thumb that is becoming misshapen or 
sore, it is quite likely that pipe-sucking or candy- 
sucking or tobacco-chewing will disregard even 






312 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

more dissimilarities or emphasise even more 
similarities than thumb-sucking. 

In examining the actions and habits that serve 
as symbols we shall soon come to the very justi- 
fiable conclusion that there is no manifestation of 
human existence that does not serve as a symbol 
of something other than what it seems itself 
to be. 

We take satisfaction out of what we do, or 
we should not be doing it. If we did not take 
satisfaction out of it, if it, did not fill our require- 
ments or satisfy our desires, they would be dif- 
ferent. There would occur to us the need of 
some other. That the need of some other satis- 
faction has not occurred to us is a proof that we 
are thoroughly satisfied with what we are doing. 
A reservoir holding one gallon has no empty 
space in it when it contains one gallon. A reser- 
voir built to hold a hundred gallons is miserably 
empty if it contains only one gallon. Our ca- 
pacity is measured by our dissatisfaction. 

Let it not be thought that because there are 
many complainers and carping critics there are 
many dissatisfied persons. Complaining is in 
some people a form of expressing satisfaction. 
If that seems too paradoxical, it will certainly 
be admitted that fault-finding and complaining 
are forms of satisfaction. They are evidently 
the form selected by the complaining persons. 



EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS 313 

They symbolise, or represent in the adult, the 
crying of the infant, which has pleasure for him 
because he is exercising newly-found powers. 
The unconscious popular phrase for the pleas- 
ure derived from complaining is found in the 
saying, " She is enjoying poor health.'' 

As all satisfactions and dissatisfactions are not 
expressed by words, which are only surrogates 
for actions, but only by the way we react upon 
our environment, we have a very clear indication 
of the exact status of character of any individual. 
For instance, an irritable person is ever on the 
alert to take offence because he is constantly 
afraid of being damaged. He has not much 
power, and fears to lose what he has. If he felt 
very rich in every kind of goods he would be 
careless of defence. If his resources are un- 
limited, he will always have more than enough 
for himself no matter how much may be taken 
from him. 



I 



CHAPTER XIII 



CONCLUSION 



We have seen the Unconscious producing its 
effects in our mistakes of reading, writing and 
acting; that it prevents the occurrence to the 
mind of whatever is emotionally toned in an un- 
pleasant way, so that even criminals will have 
their thought processes arrested for a measurably 
short time by any word that may call up their 
crimes. We have seen that the unconscious wish 
is ever active, steering our behaviour for good 
or bad every hour of our waking lives and supply- 
ing us with the material for our dreams at night. 
It also helps, when rightly controlled, in solving 
our problems for us, as we frequently find that 
though we may have given no conscious thought 
to certain questions, our minds are already made 
up on those points. We have seen that there 
stands in the way of the direct utterance of the 
literal wishes of the Unconscious a force called 
the psychic censor, representing the requirements 
of society, or that part of society in which we 
live, and that it succeeds in preventing the appear- 
ance of the crassest desires in our consciousness, 

314 



CONCLUSION 315 

but that these desires, still alive in the Titan's 
world, succeed in gaining access to the world of 
consciousness by virtue of being disguised and 
appearing as symbols. We have seen that the 
symbols used by the Unconscious for the pur- 
pose of gaining admittance to our conscious 
thoughts are of the most varied nature. In fact, 
there is no mental state, there is no physical ex- 
pression of a mental state, that is not a symbol, 
from the way we address a meeting to the way we 
cut our finger nails and the colour of neckties and 
other clothing that we wear. The symbol may be 
a turn of thought shown in the use of a bit of 
slang or a figure of speech, or it may be a hys- 
teria, or a phobia or an eczema or a constipation 
or an attack of exophthalmic goitre. In psycho- 
analysis, which is the only means as yet dis- 
covered for penetrating for any distance into the 
depths of the Unconscious, we have a method 
by which, if it is rightly carried out, we may be 
relieved of a great deal of the worry which be- 
sets our modern urban existence, a method of 
understanding and therefore of better appreciat- 
ing our fellows, of reading their hearts behind 
their actions, which makes the passing show have 
for all of us a deeper meaning and a greater in- 
terest, and finally we have, unless I am greatly 
mistaken, seen the cause why so much, of modern 
scholastic education is so unsatisfactory, both to 



316 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 

the teacher and to the pupil, for with the knowl- 
edge that the Unconscious plays so great a part in 
behaviour of both instructor and instructed comes 
the realisation that it is an essentially hopeless 
task to try to do what we are now trying to do 
with the pupil. It is only when the newer psy- 
chology is communicated to the teacher that a 
real progress will be made in educating the chil- 
dren in schools, both elementary and secondary. 
The material progress of the last century has 
been enormous. Space and time have both been 
triumphed over; but men's souls are as unedu- 
cated as they were thousands of years ago. So 
that we may say to ourselves, with a deeper mean- 
ing than ever has been possible : 

" For thou hast driven the foe without, 
See to the foe within." 






INDEX 



Abreaction, 252 

Adler, A., 258 

Adult, 86 

Ambivalence, 132 

Analogy, 233, 295 

Analysand, 146 

Analysis, 148 

Anger, 304 

Antagonism, 279 

Artlessness, 109 

Association test, 108 

Attitude toward Uncon- 
scious, 121 

Bertschinger, quoted, 255 

Bisexuality, 134, 273 

Bleuler, quoted, 184 

Blindness, 222, 239 

Censor, 71, 72 

Christian Science, 253 

Complex, 31, 112 

Complex indicator, 115 

Condensation in dreams, 
158 

Conflicts, 110 

Consecutiveness, lack of, in 

Constipation, 68 

Conversation, 84 

Conversion, 221, 238, 267 

Craving, 30, 51, 93 

Day-dreaming, 247 

Directed thinking, 26, 124 

Disinclination, 120 

Displacement in dreams, 160 

Dramatisation in dreams, 167 

Dreams, 144 

Drink, 55, 74 

Education, 265 

Elan vital, 51 



Electra, 31, 138, note 
Emotions, 62 
Erogenous zones, 128 
Everyday actions, 104, 200 
Excitement, 100 
Exhibitionism, 131, 283 
Exophthalmic goitre, 22y 
Fate, 88 

Father-image, 142, 273 
Fatigue, 124 
Fixation, 32 
Fore-conscious, 38 
Forgetting, 62, 65, 209 
Freud, S., 1, note, 3, 4, 5, 6, 

7, 10, 11, 49, 72, 91, 128, 

165, 168, 169, 172, 203, 242 
Gravitation, psychic, 244 
Hate, 304 

Hero-worship stage, 134 
Homosexual stage, 134 
Horme, 51 
Husband and wife, 34, 117, 

140 
Hysteria, 68 
Image, 142 
Incest, 27, 138 
Infant, 83, 140 
Infantile in dreams, 171 
Inferiority, 56, 258 
Interpretation, 150 
Intolerability, 95 
Introversion, 82 
Irritation, 284 
James, William, quoted, 48, 

233, 245 
Jocasta, 28, 137 
Jones, Ernest, 16 
Jung, C. G., 173, 174, 194 



317 



3 i8 



INDEX 



Kaplan, 41, 71, 215 
Lapsus lingua, 211 
Latent content, 151 
Libido, 12, 51 (see also: 

Craving) 
Love, 304 

Manifest content, 151 
Masochism, 131 
Memory, see: Retentiveness, 

Forgetting 
Memory work, 293 
Mental activity, object of, 

266 
Mental healing, 253 
Moral struggle, 220 
Mother, 33, 117, 137, 139 
Mother-image, 142 
Mother-infant relation, 101 
Moving-pictures, 196 
Narcissism, 131 
Neologisms, 206 
Nirvana, 127 

CEdipus myth, 18, 28, 136 
Over-determination, 159 
Pain, 85, 127, 262 
Pfister, O., 68, 119, 121, 203, 

225, 254, 264, 271 
Phantasy, 53 
Pharaoh, dreams of, 153 
Phobia, 118 

Pleasure-pain, 85, 112, 127 
Psyche, The individual, 127 
Psychic gravitation, 244 
Psychotherapy, 220 
Rationalisation, 16 
Reality, 85, 93, 127 
Reasoning by analogy, 233 
Regression, 88 
Repression, 50 



Resentment, 308 
Resistances, 107, 148 
Resymbolisation, 257 
Retentiveness, 45 
Sadism, 131, 289 
Schizophrenia, 217 
Secondary elaboration in 

dreams, 161 
Self-abuse, 133 
Sex, 10, 130, 229 
Socrates' maieutic method, 

174 
Sublimation, 80 
Superiority, 57, 280 
Symbolism, 67 
Sympathy, 191 
Symptomatic actions, 212 
Thackeray, quoted, 172 
Thinking, abstract, 301 
Thinking, directed, 26, 124 
Thinking, two kinds of, 176 
Thinking, undirected, 124, 183 
Thoughts, source of, 98 
Thumb-sucking, 129, 311 
Titans, 1, 20, 22, 54, 59 
Transference, 260 
Typical dreams, 152 
Unconscious, 8, 40, 43, 48 
Undirected thinking, 124, 183 
Unknown element in action, 

Vitality of Unconscious, 65, 

177 
Wish, 144, 168 
Wish-fulfilment in dreams, 

168 
Worry, 101 
Zones, erogenous, 128 






1 



